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This week Asheville, North Carolina, got its drinking water back. That's almost two months after Hurricane Helene knocked the intake pipes out of commission. But more than a dozen smaller communities in western North Carolina are still without drinkable water or functioning sewer systems. As Katie Myers, with Blue Ridge Public Radio and Grist, reports, many communities have adjusted to living waterless.
KATIE MYERS, BYLINE: Spruce Pine Montessori School, like everyone else in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, is entering its third month without water or sewer. They've made adjustments, but they weren't cheap.
JENNIFER RAMBO: They came with a soap pumper.
MYERS: As kids ran around the playground, Jennifer Rambo, the head of the school, demonstrated one of their new portable hand-washing stations.
RAMBO: And you pump the soap, wash your hand, and then you push the foot pedal, and the water comes out.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER RUNNING)
RAMBO: There's a reservoir for the clean water.
MYERS: The school pays hundreds of dollars a month for porta-johns, hand-washing stations and bottled water. People here have had to get creative to fill their sanitation needs. Like Meredith Olan - she runs the history museum in the town of Banner Elk. To flush the toilet, she uses creek water.
MEREDITH OLAN: I'm very adept at carrying buckets now (laughter). It's a lot of buckets these days.
MYERS: She boils water to use for a camp shower, unless she can visit a friend's house.
OLAN: People who were getting it back on in their wells and that kind of thing were kind of whispering, my well's back on. If you want to come take a shower, go ahead.
MYERS: Running water lines in mountain communities isn't easy at the best of times. Even Asheville, a major tourism hub, only just got drinkable water back after 53 days without. They've had to build new pipes and use chemicals to make the muck in the reservoir sink to the bottom. Clay Chandler with Asheville Water says the geography of the mountains is a reason it took so long.
CLAY CHANDLER: This is a really, really great place to live. It's beautiful. The people are amazing. But, man, it makes it hard to operate a water system.
MYERS: For small towns, it's also become a public safety issue. In Spruce Pine, firefighter Chris Westveer says he can't do his job properly.
CHRIS WESTVEER: If we had a big fire and we needed to take several thousand gallons or more out of the system, we don't really know for sure how long that supply would hold up.
MYERS: Westveer remembers an electrical fire at a flooded house where they had to pump water from the river to put it out. Spruce Pine's water system had issues before the storm. Darlene Butler, the town manager, says she wished the town had had the money to fix its pipes before Helene.
DARLENE BUTLER: I think like most small towns, we've struggled for the funds to be proactive instead of reactive.
MYERS: Plus, most water intakes and treatment plants are in the flood plain, next to rivers and streams where the water comes from. Butler's hoping to change that with help from the federal government.
BUTLER: A lot of what FEMA will help us with is mitigation and moving things that can be moved out of the flood plains.
MYERS: These repairs are costly - more than the town's entire annual budget. Even for Asheville, replacing every aging pipe would be tough. Lines were laid 50 or 60 years ago in many cases and are buried beneath roads and buildings.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: (Vocalizing).
MYERS: Meanwhile, the teachers at Spruce Pine Montessori are doing their best to make the lack of water fun for the kids. When the truck arrives to empty the porta-johns, they get excited.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: They're going to pump it all out, and then they're going to put a clean...
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #2: (Laughter).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: ...Chemical in there. Isn't that great?
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #3: Yay.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: All right.
MYERS: They're taking it in stride while the town is installing a temporary wastewater treatment plant. Officials say the full fix could take two years or more. For NPR News, I'm Katie Myers in Spruce Pine, North Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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