Around the mountain town of Banner Elk, neighbors have endured two weeks without running water — a harsh and dirty reality that has hundreds living in the 19th century, toting buckets to the river, collecting trickles from a spring, answering nature’s call behind a bush.
Hurricane Helene carried off the town’s water and sewer system, and since then volunteers established a relief station that rivals the local Walmart, stocking enough bottled water to fill a reservoir, drawing from a tanker truck parked behind Town Hall.
But that only covers thirst. Consider bathing.
“Wet Wipes are a great way to wash yourself,” said Kimberly Tufts, a retired teacher who went a week without showering. “My husband’s not a fan. He says they leave a residue.”
Or flushing toilets.
“We carry buckets from a retention pond,” said Tufts. “We get three flushes out of a bucket.”
Or almost anything else.
“It’s been hell,” said Nancy Owen, the town’s tourism director. “You can’t brush your teeth. You can’t wash your hands. I can’t fill up the dog’s bowl. I can’t take a shower. I can’t mop my floors. But it’s fun. I don’t need the basic comforts.”
After two weeks, it’s impossible to know how many people remain without water in North Carolina’s 25 most western countries – the sprawling territory wrecked by Helene on Sept. 27.
But U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards, who represents much of North Carolina’s west, reported that Asheville, Black Mountain, Woodfin, Spruce Pine, and Burnsville water systems were unable to deliver water to some or all of their customers.
When they talk about a timetable for bringing it back, officials there use phrases like “yet to be determined,” and residents brace for months without water at the least.
Gov. Roy Cooper visited the North Fork Reservoir, which provides water to Asheville, Thursday with Sen. Thom Tillis, Congressman Chuck Edwards, and Michael Regan, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, along with state and local officials.
During a press conference with the murky lake as a backdrop, Asheville water resources director David Melton said the city will increase the amount of aluminum sulfate it uses in the reservoir. The chemical helps particulates clump together so they can drop to the bottom, making it possible for the water to pass through the plant’s filtration system.
The group also announced that workers had finished repairing a 36-inch distribution line in the system around 1 a.m. Thursday, which they described as a critical repair, but said it still could be weeks before the water is flowing to all customers.
In Banner Elk, the town warns that washed-out water and sewer lines must be replaced, disinfected and thoroughly tested. NC Sen. Ralph Hise told WRAL this week that replacing Mitchell County’s water plant is a “four-year process.”
“If at any time you find that you have water for even a brief moment,” wrote Town Manager Rick Owen in a town-wide message, “it should not be considered safe to drink.”
In Asheville alone, that list represents tens of thousands of people – perhaps half of its nearly 40,000 households.
Workers there scramble to rebuild a distribution system blown apart by flooding that scoured out lines buried more than 20 feet underground, some encased in concrete engineers believed would protect them from devastating storms.
Before Helene, Asheville claimed some of the most pristine drinking water in the world. Now, city officials describe the North Fork Reservoir as looking like chocolate milk from silt churned off the bottom and now refusing to settle.
Meanwhile, across all of the Western North Carolina region, including rural areas where people rely on well water but don’t have power to the pumps that would deliver it, residents persist in a world more like 1824 than 2024.
“You kind of just have to get used to being unkempt,” said Paige Carter, a 17-year-old senior at T.C. Roberson High School in Buncombe County, waiting for a turn at the shower in a YMCA.
‘Eight days without a shower’
In Banner Elk, the city celebrated the arrival of laundry machines set up inside of a tractor-trailer, and the hundreds still remaining in town rejoiced that the Best Western opened its showers in four rooms to all comers.
“I went eight days without a shower,” said Dylan Joslin, drying his hair with a towel outside room 108. “It was pretty miserable. I’ve been doing a lot of chain-saw work in the mud, with the dust flying everywhere. Wet Wipes are your friend.”
Even more welcome in Banner Elk are the dozens of portable toilets set up at Town Hall, at the Lowe’s hardware store or in bank parking lots. Still, the convenience only reaches so far.
“Everyone is trying to pee outside as much as they can,” said Nola Bloemendaal, mother of four. “But not everybody is comfortable with that. My kid stepped in people poop. Those porta-potties took a while to get here.”
Outside the town of 1,000, where the elevation reaches 4,000 feet and the woods crawl with wildlife, the line between human and nature is easily blurred.
“It’s like camping inside your house,” said Jarrett Koski, preschool teacher. “The novelty wears off when you go to use the potty and the deer is on one side and the bear is on the other.”
With four kids, Bloemendaal initially found life without electricity to be hardest.
Her oldest son, Blake, has Down syndrome and uses a breathing machine that was impossible to charge. Her second-oldest, Evan, has both autism and epilepsy, and he became very agitated about dwindling battery levels.
But when the lights flicked back on, the water problems were waiting.
At first, her family lugged buckets up from the Elk River. Then they realized they could drive to the nearby mill pond and dip them into the surface, collecting water for toilet flushing and, once boiled, dishwashing and baths.
“I actually used rainwater to wash my hair,” she said.
“One time I went out in the rain and got my hair wet,” said her youngest daughter Molly, 10. “I didn’t have any soap.”
“Just don’t take a shower,” said her third-oldest, Paul, 13. “Third option. Never let anybody tell you what to do.”
Mother rolled her eyes.
On Wednesday, the Bloemendaals had a new 5-gallon Igloo cooler perched on the bathroom sink for brushing teeth and washing faces, and their dog McEnroe had a case of bottled water waiting next to his bowl.
Even with two weeks of practice, the daily challenge of finding distilled water for Blake’s breathing machine tests their humor and endurance.
Poop jokes only carry them so far.
”Our house has not washed away in a mudslide,” Bloemendaal said. “This is OK.”
Finding water for toilets, drinking
In Asheville, some hotels that still had guests sent them to scoop water from the swimming pool for flushing. People who have fishing ponds or live near creeks fetched from those.
Residents of Aston Park Tower, a 1970s-era 11-story, 119-unit public housing apartment building near downtown Asheville, don’t have a swimming pool or a fishing pond.
Immediately after the storm, they had to find ways to get enough water to live.
“I called it the zombie walk,” said James Kesterson, 53, who has a one-bedroom apartment on the tower’s top floor. Every day he would walk from one site to another and gather water: bottles given away here, a tanker truck filling containers there.
With no electricity in his building, he had to lug the water upstairs, stopping at each landing to rest. With a case of 16-ounce bottles weighing about 30 pounds, he wasn’t about to flush that water down the toilet.
The power has returned so the elevators are working in the tower, and drinking water is easier to find. According to Edwards’ updates, FEMA has delivered more than 6 million liters of water to Western North Carolina, and relief agencies and volunteers have delivered millions more.
In some places, bottled water is so plentiful it’s used as temporary door stops so that stuffy buildings with no cooling can be open to fresh air.
There wasn’t much fresh air in Aston Tower on Wednesday.
Though drinking water is more readily available, no one wants to use it to flush toilets, so the building has a fetid air.
Garbage that had piled up in the building has been cleared out now that collection trucks are running again, but that scent lingers, too.
A ‘flush brigade’ in Asheville
When volunteers from BeLoved Asheville knocked on Kesterson’s door Wednesday and asked, “Do you need your toilet flushed?” he welcomed them in.
Leeza Regensburger and Erica Dowd had gathered with two dozen others in the parking lot of a Gold’s Gym on the south side of town earlier that morning, part of what organizer Rebekah Todd called a “flush brigade.”
”Todd’s scouts went out ahead of the group to check on a list of low-income independent-living facilities whose residents likely don’t have gray water to use for flushing or the strength to lift a 5-gallon bucket to their tank.
BeLoved Asheville’s flush brigade and others plan to do this work as long as it’s needed to reduce the spread of disease, improve quality of life and give volunteers a chance to do wellness checks on residents who may not be able to get help otherwise.
Asheville, Todd said, is not handling what comes out of the bottom of the city.
“It’s a nightmare.”
While the volunteers worked in his bathroom, Kesterson mused on how the water-system crash wrought by Helene has served as an equalizer in his community, where there is a strong contrast between wealthy retirees and the poor of the working class.
“We’re getting back to basics,” he said. “If you want to look for a silver lining, I think it’s brought people together and brought them perspective.
“Waiting in line for water, I’ve run into people with a lot of money and people who were living in a tent. They’re standing next to each other. Now we’re all in the same boat.”
