Home Care In Fork, NC

ASHEVILLE – City officials announced Asheville’s water distribution system has been “substantially restored” as of Oct. 16, with 75 to 80 percent of the system running non-potable water to city and county residents.

That percentage is likely to increase by the end of the day as service expands in North Asheville and West Asheville, which first began receiving water on Oct. 15, according to spokesperson Clay Chandler. As the system pressurizes, tanks fill and the pump stations start operating, more homes in these areas will start to see water trickle in.

“While not everyone has returned to water service yet, and there’s still much work to be completed before we have full restoration, our crews have made tremendous progress,” Assistant City Manager Ben Woody said in a Oct. 16 briefing.

Residents with homes at higher altitudes will get service back “a little after their neighbors” in lower lying areas. This is in part because the tank that feeds these homes is likely at a higher elevation and requires a pump station to push water up from a lower altitude, Chandler explained.

More:Here's where to find Asheville-area food, water distribution sites

The city can’t simply switch on those pump stations because of the amount of air in the water lines that needs to be “let off.”

“There’s a lot of air in the water line; It’ll burn it up, and those things are extremely expensive and extremely difficult to replace,” Chandler said.

Work starting to restore Eastmoor's water

Before Tropical Strom Helene swept through Western North Carolina, a single 6-inch line brought water to about 75 homes in the Eastmoor neighborhood. The line was “completely washed across the Swannanoa River” during the storm, Chandler said.

Without water, Eastmoor residents have gotten creative, specifically 17-year-old Carson Stubbs. Stubbs and a group of young people created a pulley system to quickly get water out of a spring nearby and started using water filters donated by LifeStraw to get clean drinking water.

Helene recovery in Buncombe:Water returns slowly, donation needs change, more

But starting Oct. 16, a crew from TP Howard’s Plumbing will begin clearing out debris and underbrush where the 6-inch pipe used to lie. Meanwhile, a temporary pipe will be placed to service the neighborhood, Chandler said.

However, the water pressure coming through the temporary pipe will have less pressure than normal. With the neighborhood having some elevation change, Chandler said it’s important for low-lying neighbors to conserve as much water as possible to help those living up the hill.

What about Bee Tree?

About 40 homes in Swannanoa’s Bee Tree community are still without water – an area that received severe damage from Helene. But the good news: the water line that serves the neighborhood is still intact, Chandler said.

Yet, Asheville’s water resources crew needs to complete backfilling on the line for stabilization, so it can withstand water pressure.

“That backfilling should be complete by late today or early tomorrow,” Chandler said.

Water treatment begins on North Fork's 'chocolate milk' reservoir

Watershed officials are beginning to treat water in the North Fork Reservoir so it can pass through the water treatment plant filter. The reservoir is the source for more than 70 percent of Asheville's water customers.

“That lake was flipped completely upside down by Helene,” Chandler said. “Sediment on the bottom came all the way to the top and turned what is normally crystal-clear, pristine water into something that strongly resembled chocolate milk.”

The reservoir stores untreated water pumped from the Mills River, where suspended material typically settles out. Upon entering the treatment plant, any remaining particulate is treated with aluminum sulfate, a salt, which causes the heavy particles to settle out into catch basins.

Officials plan to dump the saltish mineral straight into the reservoir starting Oct. 16. The sulfate will work to clump together billions of clay particles suspended in the water, weighing the particles down enough to sink to the bottom, Chandler said. The reservoir should then clear from the top down.

More:Asheville reservoir to get direct water treatment in effort to speed return of supply

Caustic soda will then be added to adjust the pH of the water, allowing the aluminum sulfate to do its job. The mineral is normally used in the city’s water treatment and filtration process, according to Chandler.

“By Friday, we will have an idea, at least, of how long that treatment process will take. It’s just too early to know, with the temperature of the water and the current levels of turbidity, how long that will take,” Chandler said.

In the meantime, a boil water notice is in effect for every customer served by the city of Asheville, including Mills River and North Fork.

“This was done out of an abundance of caution, because now that North Fork is online, there are mixing zones … where water from the two plants can potentially mix,” Chandler said.

Woody previously asked residents who had regained water to help flush the system by flushing private lines for about 15 minutes via bathtub or outdoor faucets. Before flushing, close valves to hot water heaters and other appliances such as ice makers.

Even as water flushes and grows clearer, it is unsafe for consumption. City water is safe for laundry, showering, and hand washing if no food preparation is done directly after.

What to know:Legionnaires' disease, tetanus among health risks North Carolina residents face in the wake of Helene flooding

Ryley Ober is the Public Safety Reporter for Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. She is a graduate of Indiana University and was the Citizen Times Summer News Reporting Intern in 2022. Email her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @ryleyober

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More than half of the people served by Asheville’s Water Resources Department remain without access to water as of Oct. 13, more than two weeks after devastating flooding in the region.

The number of people without water in the city’s water department footprint is roughly 90,000 to 100,000, said spokesman Clay Chandler during a Buncombe County news conference Sunday. The water system supports about 160,000 people, including customers in Asheville and Buncombe and Henderson counties.

Officials have said they don't anticipate water fully returning to customers for weeks at a minimum.

Nearly 80% of the customers receive water from North Fork Reservoir, which was heavily affected by sediment from heavy precipitation brought by Tropical Storm Helene. The water department started to directly treat the reservoir to clear up the murky waters.

Additionally, lines at the North Fork Water Treatment facility — the principal plant in the system — were completely destroyed. Helene also broke backup water lines buried 25 feet underground.

When asked what was the greatest challenge officials faced in getting water back to customers, Chandler said, "basically everything."

U.S. EPA Administrator Michael Regan and Gov. Roy Cooper visited the reservoir on Oct. 10, the same day water department crews connected a 36-inch bypass line damaged in the storms. On Saturday, Buncombe County officials announced water was flowing through the line and reaching some customers in Swannanoa, though the water was heavily chlorinated and contains sediment.

What to do before water service returns

Asheville officials have provided instructions of what residents should do before water service returns:

Boil water notice remains in effect for Asheville area

With water now reaching some customers who rely on the North Fork reservoir, the city reminded customers Friday that the water is not safe to drink from the tap and they must boil it for at least one minute before consumption. A boil water notice for water from North Fork means there are confirmed contaminants in the water.

The water is safe for cleaning, such as laundry, showering (don't get it in your mouth), washing dishes and flushing toilets.

Customers who receive water from the Mills River treatment plant are under a boil water advisory. While there are no confirmed contaminants, officials have said there is reason to believe they exist. Whether under a boil water notice or advisory, the action is the same: vigorously boil the water for at least one minute before consumption.

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Hurricane Helene swept across the Southeast, causing major flooding and destruction throughout North Carolina. Here is ongoing coverage from The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer about Hurricane Helene and the aftermath, particularly in Western North Carolina.

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The City of Asheville will start pressurizing parts of its water system served by the North Fork Reservoir this weekend, the next step in trying to rebuild the network of distribution lines ripped apart by flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Helene.

The process likely will reveal new breaks and leaks in the towns of Swannanoa and Black Mountain, which sustained some of the worst damage from flooding in the Swannanoa River.

It won’t immediately provide those areas with drinkable water.

Clay Chandler, spokesman for Asheville’s water resources department, said Friday that repair crews are on standby and will be “playing Whac-A-Mole” with the leaks, some of which are likely to shoot water straight into the air, he said. Chandler and Ben Woody, Asheville’s assistant city manager, explained the plan Friday during Buncombe County’s regular Helene recovery briefing, live-streamed through the county’s Facebook page.

This week, crews finished repairs to a 36-inch bypass line that will allow water to start flowing from the reservoir located north of Black Mountain. The North Fork Reservoir is the largest of the city’s three impoundments and serves some 70% of its customers, including those in Black Mountain and Swannanoa.

But the water that will start flowing into the system this weekend won’t be of the pristine quality to which Asheville customers are accustomed.

Gov. Roy Cooper visited the North Fork Reservoir Thursday with state and local officials and heard that normally, water in the lake is so clear it’s possible to see fish swimming 10 feet down.

However, Helene “flipped” the reservoir, bringing silt up from the bottom and stirring it into the water like it was run through a blender.

The particulates became electrically charged and have continued to bounce off each other, keeping the water murky and gritty and limiting visibility to just a few inches. Cooler temperatures this week have slowed the process even more, the city says.

The water can’t be processed by the nearby treatment plant because the particulates are so large they would quickly jam up the plant’s filtration.

Friday, Woody described for the public the process that will be used to try to accelerate the process of settling the particulates back to the bottom of the reservoir. Crews will curtain off sections of the reservoir with underwater semi-circular partitions and treat each section with aluminum sulfate, a coagulant that’s expected to clump the clay particles together and cause them to fall to the bottom.

Officials won’t make a guess about how long that process might take.

Meanwhile, though, the city will start drawing water directly from the reservoir – suspended silt and all – into the repaired 36-inch line and push it into the smaller feeder lines. That will allow them to find the breaks and leaks they haven’t already located, all of which must be repaired before additional communities can be added back on.

Over the coming days or weeks, crews will continue to pressurize lines, find and fix leaks, and keep moving west until the system is repaired.

Woody said that customers in Black Mountain and Swannanoa might notice water flowing through their pipes this weekend, and told them it will contain lots of sediment. They should shut off intake lines to appliances, including water heaters, to prevent damage from silt buildup, he said. Power should be shut off to water heaters as well, he said, until the system is restored.

In Swannanoa, water that flows into the system through this process can be used if boiled, Woody said. But in Black Mountain, because of additional issues there, the water should not be used for drinking even if boiled.

This story was originally published October 11, 2024, 5:08 PM.

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During Buncombe County's Monday briefing Oct. 7, Asheville's Assistant City Manager Ben Woody said it will take weeks to restore the city's water system after it was heavily damaged in flooding from Tropical Storm Helene, which tore through the area Sept. 26 and 27.

Since the city's team of dedicated engineers and contractors began work on the water system last Monday, they have made significant progress, Woody said. As of Friday, Oct. 4, the Mills River plant is fully operational, providing clean water to southern Asheville — about 20% of the city's water system.

However, to get clean water to the other 80% of the system, major repairs are needed at North Fork Reservoir, the city's principal plant. The holdup? Helene completely destroyed the plant's water lines.

More:Here's where to find Asheville-area food, water distribution sites

Asheville water restoration process

First, contractors must fix the water lines by reestablishing a bypass line across a creek bed at North Fork. While contractors have struggled to connect the line across the 25 feet of creek bed due to its high water levels from the storm, Woody is hopeful to have the bypass work done later this week.

After the bypass line is reconstructed, the water at North Fork Reservoir must be treated, or filtered and pressurized, before it can be distributed. Before Helene, this water source was one of the most protected and pristine in the country, but in Woody's words, it now looks like "chocolate milk."

The time it will take to clean the debris-filled water cannot yet be determined.

When will water be restored to Asheville?

Although there is no definite timeline for when Asheville can expect access to clean water, Woody advised that it will likely be weeks, not days.

When water restoration does begin, it will happen in sequence starting at distribution systems closest to the source of the water. This means that those who live closer to North Fork will receive access to water first, and access will spread farther out as work progresses.

Woody advised that as access to clean water becomes available, it is critical to conserve that water.

Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images

Hurricane Helene ripped up from Florida to the Carolinas last week, killing more than 100 people and leaving devastation in its wake that will take weeks or months even to assess.

A new study published in Nature suggests its impacts will be even greater. On average over the past nearly 100 years, a tropical cyclone hitting the U.S. is associated with somewhere between 7,000 to 11,000 deaths. Helene, though, was more powerful than the average; its likelihood and rainfall intensity were increased by human-caused climate change.

When storms are active, people die, for instance, when floods rip through neighborhoods, or when trees fall on them. But the new study shows that losses continue for months, and can last as long as 15 years, after the storm passes taxing people’s health and economic well-being, contributing to thousands of premature deaths. The total impact, the study suggests, adds up to more than 3.5 million people since 1930, more than the total number of deaths from motor vehicle accidents over the same period of time and as much as 5% of the U.S.’s total deaths.

The analysis underscores that “tropical cyclones and hurricanes are a much greater public health burden than we previously thought,” says Rachel Young, an environmental economist at the University of California, Berkeley and author of the paper.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, counts the number of deaths directly attributed to hurricanes and tropical cyclones each year: out of the 501 storms that the study looked at, the official numbers say an average of 24 people die after each storm. But the new analysis suggests the toll is some 300 times higher than the official numbers.

It makes clear, Young says, that “we should be rethinking how we are responding and the kinds of programs and policies we're putting into place after these events,”— like in the wake of Helene, a storm that is already far outside the average. The official count has already exceeded 130 people, and the number is climbing.

Uncovering the true toll

The new accounting fits with other recent analyses that suggest the true impact of climate-worsened disasters, from hurricanes to heat waves to wildfires, is orders of magnitude larger than the federal government reports. If these larger estimates are taken into account, the human and economic costs of human-driven climate change balloon, suggesting a problem that is much larger than most federal officials acknowledge.

This study, and others like it, “cast in sharp relief” the climate impacts on human life in the U.S., says Robbie Parks, an environmental health expert at Columbia University. He led a previous study that found an estimated 18,000 uncounted deaths in the months following hurricane landfalls from 1988 to 2019.

The new analysis traces out the even-longer term ripples. The researchers looked at tropical cyclones that made landfall in the U.S. between 1930 and 2018. They gathered data on all deaths in the country for that same time period, and looked at the changes in deaths reported in counties before and a full 20 years after a serious storm hit. They accounted for some counties that were hit by another storm while the impacts of the first were still playing out. Researchers also looked at other factors that changed over time, like changes in population, or the time of year.

The magnitude of the impacts surprised even the researchers. “We spent many, many years trying to make sure that what we were measuring wasn't some sort of anomaly in the data, wasn't some kind of fluke, that it was really the response from these hurricanes,” says Young. “We did every kind of test you could possibly imagine. We thought about every kind of factor that could be driving these results.” But the data spoke for itself, she says.

Unexpected deaths jump quickly after a storm hits, then keep rising for six years after the impact. They don’t go back to the previous death rate until 15 years afterward.

When the researchers looked more closely, they saw that Black Americans were more than three times as likely to die in the years following the storm than white Americans.

They also found heightened risks for people over 65. But so were infants—even ones that weren’t yet in utero, or born, at the time of the storm. The study found their death rates were 16 times higher than for toddlers, teens, and adults under 65. The study didn’t identify why—but Young thinks it could be related to the long-term, emotional and economic effects on mothers, an insidious tail of pain left behind by a hurricane.

How the harms happen

The effects linger, Parks explains, because the harms linger. After a hurricane, people often have to deal with destroyed homes. They spend their savings to move, or repair, or simply survive after a disaster. Or they move away, losing support networks and leaving others behind without one. And local economies reshuffle, so people lose their jobs and deal with new economic burdens.

“Think about a place which has infrastructure, and suddenly does not—and then you have all these people living without essential infrastructure. You can imagine the slow creep of health effects occurs over time,” says Parks.

The social and economic disruption also impacts health care. Doctor and researcher Arnab Ghosh of the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University treated patients in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 and in New York City after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. His patients struggled with the fallout for years.

“There is this rippling effect throughout the fabric of society after these events happen,” Ghosh says. “This is where the social gradients, the fault lines that exist in our society, play a role.”

After storms, diabetic patients suffer from interrupted insulin supply. Others can’t access dialysis, or move far from their care teams, losing crucial continuity. Some deal with mental health issues worsened by storm-related fallout; others find their cardiovascular problems exacerbated by stress or poor living conditions.

Many of the problems, Ghosh says, were not easily traced directly back to the storm, without careful probing and recording by doctors and nurses. It was often even difficult for a patient to see or understand the connection, he says. So Ghosh sees exactly how the direct count of health problems and even deaths related to the hurricane could—easily—be underestimated.

And, Ghosh says, it's a critical context for medical professionals like him to consider as they treat patients after the disasters—to know that they need to keep looking for connections to the storm, for months and years after.

Now we know. What next?

After Hurricane Maria hit, the Puerto Rican government initially estimated the death toll of the storm at 64. Puerto Ricans insisted that was a gross underestimate. Further analyses would put the number of lives lost in the thousands.

Roberto Rivera, a statistician at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, knows the impact of a hurricane can persist. “I'm still in Puerto Rico and all you have to do is drive around a little bit and you see the light poles, all tilted,” he says—and if the infrastructure is still in flux, so must be people’s lives and health.

An accurate count, Rivera says, is fodder to say to government leaders “look, we need to enhance the emergency policy. There are people who are dying unnecessarily.” But he says, the statistical assessments stretching out so many years are challenging, and the uncertainty in the estimate ranges in this new analysis are too high.

Helene was a more intense storm than most Climate change intensified its destructive rainfall, adding an extra 50% to the rain that fell in Georgia, NC, and beyond. Scientists expect hurricanes to continue intensifying rapidly and carrying more rainfall island as the planet heats up further.

The full picture of Helene’s damage will not be filled in for years, says Young. But whatever the official statistics say, she says, the true impact is almost certainly higher.

“We need to be giving people a lot of attention even months and years after, making sure that they're getting their insurance payouts on time, making sure that they're being made whole and that they can recover and they're not being forgotten about just because the hurricane was a month ago,” Young says.