After a week, some are still waiting. Asheville says water fully back over next 48 hours
Showers at the YMCA and borrowing water from a neighbor’s well.
These are some things Asheville residents did after a water treatment plant malfunctioned during last week’s cold snap and shut off supply for thousands.
Some 38,000 residents have been without water since Dec. 24. As of Monday thousands were still without water.
Officials are working “as hard and as fast as possible to restore service to people and businesses on the west side,” said Asheville City Manager Debra Campbell during a Tuesday news conference.
It’s not clear how many residents are still without water, but water access should be fully restored within 24-48 hours, Asheville Water Resources Director David Melton said during the update.
South Asheville customers who lost water were advised to boil what came through their taps after the Dec. 24 shutdown, the Associated Press reported. The plant restarted on Wednesday, but officials said it would take time for the water system to return to normal.
The water treatment plant in the southern part of the city was not able to produce water after parts of it “froze over,” The Asheville Citizen Times reported. The cold weather also led to about a dozen major line breaks that have since been repaired.
As of noon Tuesday, water service was restored in the southern service area, while many in the western Buncombe County were still waiting on their water to be restored, according to an update on the City of Asheville website. Boil water advisories were also lifted for the southern service area.
“Pressure in the western service area continued to increase overnight and into this morning,” the update says. “This allows City of Asheville water department staff to begin refilling the last large storage tank in the Western Buncombe County service area. Water in the tank must reach acceptable levels before being directed into service area lines and into homes. There is no hard timeline for this process, impacted areas will continue to be updated through AVL alerts.”
The City of Asheville has increased the amount of samples collected to ensure good water quality in areas that lost service, officials said. So far, no bacteria have been identified in the samples.
Much of western Asheville is under a boil water advisory, according to the city’s interactive advisory map.
The city council plans to appoint an independent review committee that will “focus on reviewing the water outage and assess infrastructure needs and the city’s response to establish what can be done to prevent future issues and improve response efforts,” Mayor Esther Manheimer said during the update.
“What we’ve learned through this process is that the communication expectation has not been met, and we need to do a better job,” Manheimer said.
City of Asheville issues apology
After residents flooded the city with complaints, city officials apologized on Twitter for what they called the water shortage crisis on Dec. 30.
“We understand the frustration caused by the impact this has caused to your day-to-day life,” officials posted on Twitter.
Residents who were still without water at the time responded to the tweet expressing their frustration with the situation.
“Water, like electricity, is a basic human need. We need water to clean, take showers or baths, wash the dishes and do laundry,” on user wrote. “This is ridiculous. Please make a better effort to get our water back and communicate when it comes on.”
City officials tweeted the next day urging customers who have water to limit what they use.
Water delivery
Since Dec. 28, the Asheville Fire Department has delivered water to more than 2,800 Asheville area residents.
Residents can call the Water Resources Customer Service line at 251-1122 between 9 a.m.-5 p.m. and the response team will deliver as much water as they need, according to the City of Asheville website.
As residents wait for their water to be restored, some have turned to neighbors and local recreation centers to fill coolers and take showers.
“We are relying on the kindness of friends and neighbors who are on well or never lost service to fill coolers and buckets of water to flush toilets!!” Candler resident Adrienne Franklin told The Charlotte Observer in an email.
Franklin wrote that, adding that local YMCA branches have opened their doors for residents who want to take showers. “We were there this morning with our six- and four-year-old, to shower!!”
YMCA of Western North Carolina branches near Asheville opened their doors for residents who wanted to take showers, city officials said. YMCA locations and hours can be found at ymcawnc.org.
Charlotte Observer reporter Joe Marusak contributed to this story.
