Post-Helene Asheville, North Carolina Reaches A Clean Milestone

Hurricane Helene devastated parts of Asheville, North
Carolina and cut off its water supply. As of this week
the water is on, and doesn't require boiling before use.
Although sections of the city remain devastated, the
majority of this tourist town is open and 
looking for visitors to return. 

On Monday, for the first time in 53 days, Asheville, North Carolina residents could put a glass under their kitchen tap, fill it, and gulp down a refreshing slug of water.  

Without boiling it first. 

That simple task had been impossible since Hurricane Helene devastated the region on September 27.

Among a million other things, the extreme hurricane and flood trashed water treatment plants in the region cutting off water supplies for most of the 94,000 or so residents of Asheville.

Water service returned to Asheville in the middle of October, but that water was still unsafe to drink.  The reservoir that provides most of the water for Asheville was a muddy, turbid mess. Treatment plants couldn't purify the water enough. 

But, things slowly got better. Last weekend, the city tested 120 water samples. They all came back good. So the boil water order is finally gone. 

Residents are being told to not use huge amounts of water, because that could still introduce dirt and muck into the system. So, no filling swimming pools, no watering the lawn for hours on end, no half hour long luxurious showers. 

I'm sure that's a good trade off. Better than always having to boil water. 

The return of potable water is a relief not just because it's a pain in the butt to boil water. Asheville is a big tourist town, so the lack of good water was one of many reasons tourists understandably stayed away.

After Helene the road network in the region was pretty much destroyed. Since then, many roads have reopened. 

Much of Asheville's River Arts District was obliterated by Helene's flooding. It'll take years for some of these areas to recover

But huge swaths of the city were not touched by actual floodwaters. Hotels, brew pubs, shops and attractions, including the famous Biltmore Estate.

Tourists were understandably discouraged from visiting Asheville and the rest of western North Carolina in the immediate, chaotic, tragic aftermath of Helene.  But now, parts of the region, including the city of Asheville, and much of Buncombe County, where Asheville is located, are open for business, and could use your tourist dollars.

Per the Asheville Citizen Times:

"Buncombe County could experience a 70 percent decline in tourism over the last there months of the year, the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority told the Citizen Times in an email - translating to more than $584 in last revenue.

The travel and hospitality industries generate $3 billion in local spending, representing 20 percent of the local economy, the agency says."

I was in Asheville as a tourist years ago. It is a lovely city, and it's worth the trip. 

The city is moving ahead with its annual Christmas celebrations, which is an obvious move. People really need that distraction.  

National, Global Climate Data Not Available Due To Hurricane Helene in North Carolina.

The National Centers for Environmental Information
building in Asheville, North Carolina.  The structure and
its physical contents were not damaged in the storm,
but the disaster disrupted the flow of critical national
and global climate data used worldwide.

 Every month, almost like clockwork, I give you updates on how the previous month's United States and global temperatures compared to previous years.  

I do that because most months these days in the age of climate change end up being the warmest on record, or if not, somewhere in the top ten list. It's important to let people know these measures of how climate change is progressing.

These monthly updates are now delayed because of a weather event that was likely made worse by the very climate change all this data was tracking. 

NOAA's  National Centers for Environmental Information, which compiles all this detailed global climate data, is headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina. It's the world's largest environmental data center. 

As we know, Asheville was brutalized by the flooding from Hurricane Helene. Swaths of the city were inundated or even swept away by floodwaters. Power, internet and water were out for weeks, and still hasn't been fully restored. 

Because of all this, the U.S. September climate report, which was supposed to be released on September 8, and the global climate report, which was supposed to go out October 10, have been delayed and we still have no idea when we'll see these documents. 

That's not good, because these monthly climate reports are not just interesting to geeks like me. Both the private and public sectors use them, including organizations and governments involved in agriculture, energy, retail, reinsurance, transportation and media. 

Thankfully, nobody who works at NCEI was hurt in the disaster. The building itself is intact and computer systems and existing data were not lost.  Old archives on paper and film are also safe. 

The servers at NCEI need a big, powerful cooling system, which relied on Asheville municipal water to get the job done. Hurricane Helene cut off the municipal water supply, and just this week, only some of the first steps toward getting that supply flowing again have started.

NCEI has been scrambling to set up alternative cooling systems. 

As of Thursday, things were beginning to look up.  NCEI takes in a lot of data daily, and they were not able to do that for weeks. Most of the usual data had started coming in as of this week, as broadband internet connections have finally been restored.

However, they have to catch up with data that never arrived during the crisis, and they might never be able to recover some of that data,

I don't know to what extent that might degrade the quality of their climate reports, if at all. 

People use NCEI information and data streams to make the point we need to adapt for climate change, to adjust the way we do things. It appears NCEI will need to do the same.

It's likely too early to plan this out in earnest, but I imagine they will need to find a redundancy, some entity somewhere else that can act as a backup if something like this ever happens in Asheville again. 

Interestingly, according to WUNC, NCEI was relocated from New Orleans to Asheville in the 1950s. Asheville was chosen because it was closer to Washington DC and because it was thought to be a historically safe climate area,

So much for that idea.  

Worries Grow About Isolated North Carolina/Tennessee Wracked By Helene

 I, along with lots of other people, are especially worried about the people in the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. 

Western North Carolina's 
road network is virtually
destroyed by the Helene
flooding, as can be seen here 

It's isolated from the catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Helene. I'm not just talking about a few backwoods hollows in the mountains. It's virtually the whole region. The crisis is worsening, and I fear the death toll up there will skyrocket.

Much like Vermont, there's tons of narrow, winding mountain roads in the region leading to an unknown number of houses, trailers, camps, resorts and local tourist attractions.  The flooding and mudslides up there were cataclysmic. Since there's no communications and electricity working, and nobody can get up there, nobody knows how many people have passed away, or are dying while they wait.

"This is looking to be Buncombe County's own Hurricane Katrina," Avril Pinder, the manager of the county which includes Asheville, told the Washington Post.  

And this from CNN:

"Officials in Buncombe County, North Carolina have received more than a thousand missing person reports through an online form, County Manager Avril Pinder said Sunday, cautioning that figure likely includes duplicate submissions and that communications outages mean people are struggling to reach one another, 

Gov. Cooper echoed that, telling reporters in a news conference, 'We know that a lot of these people are simply out of communication and are OK,"

In other words, there are certainly not 1,000 people out there that have lost their lives. The vast majority - I hope - just can't be reached via roads or phone or any means. 

But that doesn't mean everybody. Social media posts described people being swept away and not found. As the Washington Post tells us:

"The toll from the storm is likely to rise. Taylor Jones, Buncombe County's director of emergency management, said there had been multiple fatalities there, though he declined to provide exact figures. He said officials were resorting to their 'mass fatality plan' and trying to notify relatives, a process complicated by service outages."

 At 10 a.m. today, officials at a press conference confirmed at least 10 deaths in Buncombe County, reports the Asheville Citizen Times. 

As of Sunday morning, Asheville, an absolutely lovely, artsy city of about 94,000 at the foot of the Smokey Mountains, is pretty much cut off.  (Think Burlington, Vermont, only somewhat bigger and generally more upscale).

Most roads in and out of the city were still impassable. True, only parts of the city were inundated and destroyed by flood waters. But the entire metro area had no electricity, no cell service, in internet, no water through Saturday and into today at least.  

A scene from western North Carolina this week that 
almost exactly matches a similar photo taken after
devastating floods in Lyndonville, Vermont on July 30.

One news crew from Raleigh found a long roundabout way out of Asheville via South Carolina, but the service station was almost out of gas and probably is by now.  

Crowds gathered at the public library in downtown Asheville Sunday morning because wifi was available there. It was perhaps the only place in town where wifi was reachable. It does look like a crew arrived in Asheville this afternoon to set up Starlink so that other people could access wifi.

Still, it might be two or more days before electricity is restored. Power lines are down everywhere, and the city's water treatment plant was badly damaged by the flooding. 

As of Sunday morning, water and food distribution sites had not yet been set up, mostly because of transportation problems caused by the flooding. Helicopters have begun dropping supplies in remote areas. 

Small towns outside of Asheville like Castle Rock, Old Fort, Roan Mountain and Swannanoa have been almost completely destroyed. Accessing them will be harder than getting into Asheville.

I've vacationed in this part of North Carolina in the past and absolutely loved it. I hope the death toll doesn't really go up, and I hope, like everyone, that adequate aid gets there right away. As bad as the flooding and the suffering from it was in Vermont in the summers of 2023 and 2024, North Carolina and surrounding areas are far worse.