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Curtains, chlorine and caustic soda: What you need to know about the Asheville water outage

Caustic soda for treatments at North Fork Reservoir.
City of Asheville Water Resources
Caustic soda for treatments at North Fork Reservoir.

"Water resources has a really big week this week," Asheville Water Resources Public Information Officer Clay Chandler said at Monday's community briefing.

The big week he described includes a second aluminum sulfate and caustic soda treatment of the city’s main reservoir, North Fork, in the hopes of moving it toward a drinkable condition.

Asheville has been without consumable tap water since Hurricane Helene turned the reservoir "upside down" more than a month ago. Since then, water resources staff built an alternative line from the main facility to replace one destroyed by the storm. The city also tried to treat the entire reservoir with the chemical treatments designed to make sediment coagulate, but strong wind interfered.

This week, contractors installed curtains to partition off part of the lake in the hopes of making a more treatable segment.

BPR News director Laura Lee spoke with Chandler on Tuesday to learn more about the water status. Hear an extended version of the conversation here:

Clay Chandler Oct 29.mp3

Laura Lee began her journalism career as a producer and booker at NPR. She returned to her native North Carolina to manage The State of Things, a live daily statewide show on WUNC. After working as a managing editor of an education journalism start-up, she became a writer and editor at a national education publication, Edutopia. She then served as the news editor at Carolina Public Press, a statewide investigative newsroom. In 2022, she worked to build collaborative coverage of elections administration and democracy in North Carolina.

Laura received her master’s in journalism from the University of Maryland and her bachelor’s degree in political science and J.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.