ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Jeff Watts, 57, barely followed the incremental updates on his city’s water distribution system after Hurricane Helene knocked it offline in September. All he knew was that life in Asheville, North Carolina, had become more difficult and dirty.
But on Monday, he listened to every word of a voicemail message from the city informing him that, for the first time in 53 days, the water was clean enough to drink, a significant breakthrough for a place that has been dragged down by grief and financial hardship.
Watts, a landscaper who has had little work since the storm devastated western North Carolina, decided to have a beer at the Rankin Vault Lounge on Monday afternoon, but it was not quite celebratory. His home was still destroyed, most of his belongings were gone and he would continue to live in a tiny hotel room indefinitely.
“I got water,” he said, “but I have nothing else.”
The announcement from Asheville officials Monday that the boil water advisory had been lifted brought a sense of relief to residents who have spent the past two months finding ways to live without drinkable tap water. But while it felt like a promising step on the city’s path to recovery, there was still anxiety about whether Asheville, an artsy tourist destination in the mountains, could rebound from the worst natural disaster to ever strike the state.
About 12,000 people in Buncombe County, which includes Asheville, have filed for disaster-related unemployment benefits, according to Blue Ridge Public Radio. Schools did not reopen until late last month. And some renters have called for a moratorium on evictions because so many people are struggling financially.
The storm unleashed torrential rain in Asheville and the rural areas surrounding it in late September, causing land that had been saturated by previous rainfall to rapidly flood. Mudslides ripped through homes perched high in the mountains, floodwaters wrecked roads and water systems, and more than 100 people were killed in the region.
In Asheville, a city of about 95,000, most homes and businesses were completely without water for weeks. In the early aftermath of the storm, people cheered whenever water trucks drove by. Couples walked through the downtown with heavy jugs of water to bring home. Many people resorted to hiking to a creek to fill containers with water so that they could at least flush their toilets.
Running water was restored in most of the region in late October, but residents could not drink it because it contained too much sediment, and city officials initially estimated that it would take until Christmas to fully fix the treatment and distribution system. Foraging for plastic bottles became routine.
Disaster relief sites were established across the city for people to bathe, pick up bottled water and do laundry. Many residents and some schools applied for permission to dig wells. And some homeowners wrapped plastic bags around their faucets so they would not forget and use it to rinse their toothbrushes.
When running water was restored last month, officials said that it was safe enough to bathe in. Still, residents said the highly chlorinated water smelled and felt like showering in a public swimming pool.
It was one more reason many were jubilant when alerts went out to residents Monday about the water being drinkable again.
Ben Hanna, 40, was at a hardware store when an employee got a phone call with the news.
“Hey! The water is coming back on!” Hanna recalled the employee yelling. People cheered and clapped inside the store.
“We don’t have to worry about getting sick from the water that’s coming into our houses right now, and that is one little load that’s been lifted off of our minds,” Hanna said.
He has spent weeks helping distribute water through Tremont Showers, a grassroots group that set up showering stations across the city, including near public housing complexes.
Four showering stations will remain open through at least this week, he said, because some people still feel worried about the water quality.
On Monday, several residents said they would not drink Asheville’s tap water for at least awhile. Others said that while getting water back was critically important for the city, many bars and stores had suffered from losing out on business in October, the peak of the fall tourist season in the mountains.
Erick Gonzalez, 27, the general manager of Dssolvr, a brewery in downtown Asheville, said he was “not convinced” that bringing back clean water would “bring all these tourists back.”
“We still have communities surrounding us that are completely wiped,” Gonzalez said. “And for the actual city of Asheville, we’re not going to get back to normal for years.”
City officials said they tested 120 water samples over the weekend for several types of bacteria, including E. coli and coliform, and that the results showed the water was clean and safe to drink. Officials advised residents who live in homes with plumbing installed before 1988 to run cold water for 30 to 120 seconds in faucets that had not been used in more than four hours.
The city has recently received more than 2,000 requests to participate in its lead testing program, which existed before the storm.
For two weeks after the storm, the city was unable to treat raw reservoir water with a substance that provides corrosion control in pipes. Clay Chandler, a spokesperson for the city’s water resources department, said the agency had “tested sites throughout the distribution system for corrosion control residual, and the results showed that it’s taking hold.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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