Helene Flooded North Carolina with Water. Now There Isn’t Enough to Drink.

The Washington Post / Scott Dance, Joshua Partlow

13:34 JST, October 3, 2024

ASHEVILLE, N.C. – There is water to come by in this storm-ravaged swath of rural North Carolina – but just barely. Among thousands of people, there is a palpable desperation for it and other basic necessities, a grim reminder of just how far the community is from normal life.

Across the region, the torrential floodwaters after Helene tore through late last week inundated wastewater treatment plants, oil facilities and plastics factories. Pipes that deliver much of this city’s water, as well as backup lines, were destroyed, cutting off running water to about 100,000 people for an extended period, officials said. That has left many scrounging for water from pools or streams to flush toilets.

In Black Mountain, about 15 miles east of Asheville, water still isn’t running, either. Even when it starts flowing again, boil-water advisories will be ordered for weeks as pipes get patched and state labs test the water quality, said Jamey Matthews, the town’s public works manager. And the struggle extends beyond North Carolina: Many residents of Augusta, one of the most populous cities in Georgia, were also without running water Tuesday for the third consecutive day.

The question now is just how long these places will have to go without reliable taps. And at least in Asheville, a city with a history of issues with water systems, the catastrophe underscores how complex it can be to restore delivery of something as simple as water.

John Erwin came to an Ingles supermarket outside this devastated mountain town Tuesday in search of gas and water. After five hours spent mostly waiting in two separate lines, his Subaru’s tank was replenished – but the closest thing to water he could find was lemon-lime Gatorade and orange La Croix sparkling water.

“It’s just a matter of where you go and how long you wait,” Erwin said.

Erwin, 74, relies on well water at his home near Candler, N.C., but his power had still not returned after flickering on and off after the storm.

The lack of potable water has forced many to scramble.

Residents are boiling water to kill bacteria. Some are washing their dishes and bathing in creeks.

Asheville is distributing drinking water from tankers at schools and parks and requesting residents arrive with their own containers to fill up. Near Black Mountain on Sunday, hundreds of people lined up outside Pisgah Brewing Co. with jugs and bottles in hand.

And in some cases, desperation is becoming clear. When someone discovered that an 18-wheeler wrecked during the storm was full of bottled water near the brewery Sunday, dozens of people came to grab cases and hand out cases to others, until police officers arrived and shouted for them to leave.

“You are stealing!” one shouted as the crowd dispersed.

Some found help from afar.

Asheville resident Justin Visserman was able to connect with his employer, Encore Global, and arrange for a colleague to deliver several five-gallon jugs of water from Charleston, S.C.

He and his girlfriend, Kelly Curtiss, moved to Asheville just a month earlier and weren’t sure what to do. They were headed for a cabin in the mountain where they heard they could shelter.

“This is traumatic,” Curtiss said.

Communication remains spotty, but as it started to return, many residents flooded local radio stations with calls to share information with others desperate to find water and other resources. On 99.9 Kiss Country, a station out of Asheville, one caller named M.J. from Transylvania County – known for natural wonders including Whitewater Falls and Looking Glass Falls – offered a new nickname for the area: “Land of the waterfalls, and not a drop to drink.”

“We’re paying for FEMA,” the caller said. “Where is that assistance?”

FEMA has shipped 7.5 million liters of water, among other supplies, the White House said Tuesday.

Local officials said they are working around-the-clock to try to restore a reliable water supply. After outside deliveries were slow to materialize, Asheville officials spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for an emergency purchase of private water, according to City Manager Debra Campbell.

Buncombe County received its first water shipments early this week, and County Manager Avril Pinder said on Wednesday that officials are working with “private developers, private people are coming from other counties and even other states” to bring in additional tanks of water. She said local officials are “working nonstop” to restore water supplies, though she did not say when that would happen.

“We intend to be providing water until our supermarkets are back open,” Pinder said. “We will be here providing water throughout as long as there is a need in our community.”

But as far as when water systems would be fully back up and running, she stressed that “these things take time.”

“I don’t have an answer for you on a timeline,” she said during a briefing Wednesday.

Before the disaster, Asheville residents considered their water some of the finest in the country.

The city owns thousands of acres of forested mountains surrounding its main watershed, much of it preserved in conservation easements. The watersheds that serve the North Fork and DeBruhl water treatment plants – two of the three plants that serve Asheville – “are pristine,” the city says on its water website. The area’s clean water has helped make Asheville a hub for craft breweries since the 1990s, giving it the nickname “Beer City USA.”

There’s also been a long history of problems with the city’s aging water infrastructure. In the 1990s, the city’s treatment plants were losing a quarter of the system’s water to leaks and workers were repairing more than 1,000 pipe breaks every year, according to reports from local newspapers at the time.

Flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Frances in 2004 caused breaks in Asheville’s water system that led the city to install bypass lines as redundancies, Assistant City Manager Ben Woody said during a briefing Monday.

With this storm, floodwaters washed out two-foot and three-foot water main lines from the North Fork treatment plant, Woody said – pipes that deliver the majority of the city’s water. Backup lines were also washed out. National Guard personnel were responding to help workers reach the DeBruhl treatment plant, whose access road was blocked.

“The damage to the Asheville water system is catastrophic,” he said.

Local officials said that they are in contact with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and that contractors had already begun the arduous process of repairing the water mains.

Michael Burchell, a professor of biological and agricultural engineering at North Carolina State University, said he was aware of two wastewater treatment plants in western North Carolina that are not functioning after being inundated by floodwaters. He expected others may have suffered a similar fate.

“The water just flows through the plants right now and discharges on the other side,” Burchell said. “And the operators are kind of left just trying to chlorinate that bacteria before it goes into the streams.”

At a water distribution site in Asheville’s Pack Square, a steady stream of residents came to fill jugs, buckets and even quart-sized takeout containers.

Veteran busker Randall Thompson was greeting people while juggling a set of blue, red and yellow balls.

“I thought they needed me to bring smiles,” the 73-year-old said. “I keep telling kids they can’t get water unless they juggle.”

For some living in rugged areas, used to self-sufficiency, the water concerns were part of bigger challenges. Danielle Pressley-Levins said her home on the outskirts of Candler lost power for 24 hours, and once it came back, her family could draw from their well again. They had filled the bathtub up, anyway, just in case.

She’s heard of similar ordeals from friends – at least the ones she’s able to reach. To flush their toilets, they’re using water from hot tubs and pools, if they have them, or collecting water from streams.

“How is it so bad here when we weren’t really in the eye of the storm?” Pressley-Levins asked. “It’s like a nightmare on top of a nightmare.”

At Battery Park Senior Apartments in downtown Asheville, residents are finally getting water to drink – but they’re still desperate to flush their toilets. Portable toilets that were supposed to be for construction workers are now full of residents’ waste. Toilet paper is scarce too.

So when a pickup truck loaded with toilet paper and paper towels passed by Tuesday afternoon, Kevin Roush shrieked. With no working bathrooms and no way to do laundry, it looked like a godsend. But it kept driving.

The residents are allotted six bottles of donated water a day. It’s better than nothing, Roush said.

“We looked at that and thought, we’re grateful to have this water,” the 70-year-old said. “But this is not a good sign.”

The 95 residents of this building, plus 115 more in the nearby Vanderbilt Apartments, can’t go collecting water from a creek to pour into their toilets.

“I’ll have to use my drinking water as flush water,” Roush said.

But then, a half-hour after the truck sighting, it reappeared out front. Graham Weihmiller had collected paper products, sanitary wipes and canned food from his neighbors in the Providence Downs area of Waxhaw, N.C., and brought it to Asheville.

“There’s my TP truck!” Roush shouted.

“This is a miracle,” said Janice Walker, Battery Park’s assistant property manager.

“I’m not going to cry,” she said, but she couldn’t help it.