By Anne Blythe and Will Atwater
The Asheville public water system suffered catastrophic damage from the unprecedented flooding and upheaval caused by the remnants of Hurricane Helene.
While people throughout the city and Buncombe County have been hungering for answers about when their taps might start trickling again with drinkable water, there’s been a barrage of questions, too, about where they can get nonpotable, or gray water.
In a region overwhelmed by the waters that rushed through the mountains in the past week, the commodity has been difficult to come by for safe personal and household use.
“The French Broad River, the Swannanoa River — all these rivers in our area should be treated as basically a hazmat site,” Stacey Wood, a Buncombe County spokesperson, said during an Oct. 4 storm update. “Please do not touch the water or get near the water if you do not have to. There are other resources. We will make other resources available to you if that is your circumstance.”
“We cannot stress enough that all of this water flowing through our community right now should be treated as [if] it is a hazardous material,” Wood added.
Still, toilets need flushing. Other cleanup tasks require water that’s free of mud and storm debris. And the drinkable water is too valuable a resource to send it down the drain into wastewater systems.
“We’ve actually had more difficulty in securing nonpotable water than we have had in potable water,” Lillian Govus, a Buncombe County spokesperson, said during an Oct. 3 briefing with reporters.
Avril Pinder, Buncombe County manager, told reporters during several briefings this week that 10 sites are set up across the county where tankers distribute non-drinkable water for people who bring their own containers.
A tanker filled with nonpotable water was quickly emptied at one of those distribution centers, the William W. Estes Elementary School in southern Asheville. But the county continues to hunt for sources of gray water that can be trucked in to help storm-weary residents.
No timeline on a timeline
Helene dumped record rains across an already rain-soaked 25-county mountain region in North Carolina a little more than a week ago. Most every county received at least 10 inches of rain, and at least one weather station reported a three-day accumulation of more than 31 inches.
Swift water rescues were conducted in downtown Boone in Watauga County. Much of Chimney Rock, a quaint tourist village in Rutherford County, was reduced to rubble. Storm damage has been reported from as far west as Cherokee County to Mecklenburg County.
Buncombe, the most populous county in western North Carolina, was among the hardest hit with at least 72 dead. People still hindered by power outages and communications barriers have tuned in by car radios and gathered in community spots with internet access to listen to the county’s twice-a-day updates on Facebook that also are broadcast live on Blue Ridge Public Radio.
In an Oct. 4 afternoon briefing, Ben Woody, Asheville assistant city manager, brought photos to give a glimpse of the damage to the municipal water system. There are 1,800 miles of water pipeline, Woody said, enough that if laid out in a straight line end to end it could take you to Miami and back. Not all of it is damaged, but large chunks are.
Pipes that were once buried in the ground were exposed or gone. Roads to important plants are destroyed too.
“This event washed away probably 25 feet of earth,” Woody said, showing a photo of one site that was typically a creekbed people could walk across. It’s now carved out by floodwaters, exposing a large broken pipe.
Despite all the progress city workers and others have made on repairing the extensive damage, Woody refused to hazard an estimate on when the system might be up and working again.
“I’m not going to provide a timeline, and I’m not going to provide a timeline on when I’ll provide a timeline,” Woody responded to one reporter on the video call. “What I will tell you is we will update this community when we have information, and we’ll be here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to provide updates. And we’ll be here Tuesday and Thursday to answer questions.”
A plea echoed far and wide
That leaves people in the storm-ravaged county facing more days, and likely weeks ahead, in which they’ll be lining up for water they can drink and use for cooking from pallets that have been trucked or flown into the storm-ravaged region.
Firefighters from New York have come in to help build community reception centers, also known as disaster reception centers, which are pods where people can come and take showers or perhaps wash clothes.
Others have been hauling nonpotable water from creeks, streams, pools and other sources to their homes to flush toilets or use for other household tasks.
The county manager cautioned the community again on Friday afternoon about water, soil and wells that might be polluted from the storm.
“We reached out to the EPA for guidance,” Pinder said during the Oct. 4 afternoon storm update. “They are aware of potential issues, and they are working to evaluate health concerns.”
In the interim, Pinder urged residents to “please exercise an abundance of caution.”
“This is not the time to do stream cleanups unless you are part of an official agency or organization,” Pinder said. “We know a number of materials were swept into the rivers from industrial facilities, houses, farms and more, and we all want to restore our community back to its natural beauty as quickly as possible, but please hold off until we have assurance from the experts that it’s safe to do so.”
Some people in Buncombe County use private or shared wells, but they, too, have been hampered by the storm flooding.
“No one should consume water from private or shared water wells that have been flooded — that means well heads covered with water — until the well has been tested for bacteria, fecal chloroform and inorganic chemicals, including volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, pesticides, herbicide, petroleum-based products and nitrates or nitrites,” Pinder said earlier in the week. “These wells should be considered contaminated until tested.”
The county manager also urged people to not assume that it was safe to consume water from wells that had not been flooded.
“The recommendation would be to boil any water before consumption, even if the well was not flooded, until tests can be completed,” Pinder said.
Govus, Buncombe County communication and public engagement director, told reporters during an Oct. 3 briefing that Metropolitan Sewerage District of Buncombe County, which manages sewer systems for all of Buncombe and part of Henderson counties, is largely functioning.
Thirty-seven of the 40 pump stations were working, either on full power or backup power sources, by Thursday, Govus said. “Our sewage district has been operational throughout this entire disaster,” she added.
But without municipal water flowing into households such things as flushing toilets, washing clothes and other once mundane tasks have been temporarily halted in many homes.
“The team is still looking for nonpotable [water],” Pinder said Thursday, “If anyone out there has a nonpotable source of water, please call the [Emergency Operations Center]. Finding nonpotable water has been harder than I thought.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has a team of 500 workers on the ground in North Carolina who have played a critical role in the recovery response. They have supplemented the private supplies of water Asheville city officials secured with mass feeding and hydration operations.
MaryAnn Tierney, a regional FEMA administrator, told reporters during an Oct. 3 briefing that FEMA also has been working with county and state officials at the state Emergency Management operations center in Raleigh to get more gray water to the region, although there wasn’t a timeline for when that would materialize.
“That’s something that we’ve been discussing with the county,” Tierney said. “This is also being discussed in Raleigh … a way to distribute in bulk, nonpotable water so people can do things like clean their plates and flush their toilets.”
For certain tasks such as washing dishes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends boiling nonpotable water first. The CDC also recommends rinsing dishes in a separate container with water treated with household bleach.
Avoiding disease
As local, federal and state officials scramble to provide potable and nonpotable water to western North Carolina residents, it’s important for people to follow safety procedures when dealing with water, said Rachel Noble, a researcher at the UNC Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences. Noble said that even if people have running water in their homes, they should follow state-issued guidelines and boil water before drinking it.
“The last thing that western North Carolina needs right now is a sanitation issue,” she said. Noble recounted what happened a few months ago in war-ravaged Gaza in the Middle East to illustrate what could go wrong if water in western North Carolina isn’t properly treated.
“There was actually a Vibrio outbreak in Gaza because people started getting diarrhea from drinking poorly treated water,” Noble said. “You have a situation where the hurricane is causing problems, but you don’t want diarrhea and communicable disease as a layer on top of this. What that means is that you want all members of the community to abide by these drinking water guidelines so that community level sanitation stays effective.”
Helene: Resources By County by Anna MacDonald
More grim news
The “damage and economic loss” in the southern Appalachian region caused by Helene already is estimated to be at least $225 billion, according to a news release from AccuWeather Global Weather Center.
“Helene brought historic devastation and has tragically changed lives forever,” Jon Porter, AccuWeather chief meteorologist, said in a video distributed by AccuWeather. “The level of human suffering, the rising death toll and the tremendous damage to people’s homes and businesses, as well as to critical infrastructure, from telecommunications to roads and highways and water supplies, has been overwhelming.”
Porter added that there would be no quick fix for the massive destruction of the region caused by the storm.
“While recovery operations have already started, it will be a long process given the widespread destruction of homes, businesses and infrastructure,’ Porter said. “Previous disasters suggest that even 10 years after such a damaging storm, rebuilding and recovery efforts may still be ongoing in some places.”
Porter also cautioned about public health issues that might arise from a protracted recovery.
“The long-term impacts from flooding could also contribute to health conditions due to exposure to mold, mildew, contaminated floodwaters and other hazards,” Porter said. “Tragically, in the coming decade, there may be thousands of excess deaths indirectly caused by the storm or stress from experiencing the devastating impacts.”
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