ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Raw water is no longer being pushed through the Asheville water system, and the mechanism that does that is set to be taken offline Friday night, city officials said.
The boil water notice remains in effect, but it may be lifted as early as Tuesday, Asheville Water Resources Department Public Information Officer Clay Chandler said during a briefing Friday morning.
“Due to reduced turbidity levels in the North Fork Reservoir and our capacity to push treated water into the system, we’ve been able to feed a sufficient amount of filtered water into the distribution system without blending it with raw water,” Chandler said. “The last time we used raw water was last Saturday afternoon.”
That means the system has been flushing itself and nothing but treated water has gone into it since last Saturday, Chandler said.
The North Fork Reservoir, which serves about 80 percent of Asheville’s water customers, suffered catastrophic damage when the remnants of Hurricane Helene swamped the area, sending streams, creeks and rivers roaring through mountain valleys in late September.
The torrential rains and winds that hammered the area left the normally pristine water source with a turbidity measurement of more than 20. To be safe for the normal treatment process, turbidity needs to fall somewhere 1.5 and 2 NTUs, or Nephelometric Turbidity units.
As of Friday morning, the turbidity at North Fork was 15.5, Chandler said. A third round of in-reservoir treatment continued Friday.
“I don’t know exactly how long that’s going to last. It’s just all going to depend on how much aluminum sulfate and caustic soda is left. We are just going to treat until we are out of it,” Clay said.
Earlier this month Chandler announced the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would be putting multiple portable filtration units along the reservoir’s dam. Those units will send water to clear wells, which hold a couple million gallons.
“Then we’ll send it through our normal filtration processes and get you the pristine water that you have become accustomed to as a city of Asheville water customer,” Chandler said at the time.
Filtered water
The flushing process has been happening since Oct. 30. The system had been pushing 10-15 million gallons of filtered water a day into the pipes. That has been increased.
“Water Resources had our tactics meeting at 8:30 this morning,” Chandler said. “North Fork’s capacity has been pushed up to 25 million gallons of water a day. And, based on the flushing plan, that will be enough to flush the system and also meet system demand.”
Chandler said testing on the water will continue. Samples will be taken this weekend, and, depending on the results, the boil water notice could be lifted next week, Chandler said.
“The sampling test results that come back, we hope by Tuesday, potentially, that if those come back clean, or clear, then the boil water notice could be lifted as soon as Wednesday, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning. That’s sort of the timeline we’re working on right now,” Chandler said.
When that notice is lifted, that means normal water use can resume. However, if you have a home that was built before 1988, you still need to flush those pipes good before resuming normal water use.
There are 184 sampling stations throughout the system. Starting Saturday, crews will test a total of 120 points throughout the distribution system, Chandler said. They had been testing 40 sites a day.
“We haven’t had any E. coli or anything like that. We haven’t had chloroform hits or anything like that,” Chandler said. “We’ve known because of this testing process that since we started pushing water into the system that we don’t have a bacterial issue throughout our distribution system.”
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