A Week After Helene Hit, Thousands Still Without Water Struggle To Find Enough

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — Nearly a week after Hurricane Helene brought devastation to western North Carolina, a shiny stainless steel tanker truck in downtown Asheville attracted residents carrying 5-gallon containers, milk jugs and buckets to fill with what has become a desperately scare resource — drinking water.

Flooding tore through the city’s water system, destroying so much infrastructure that officials said repairs could take weeks. To make do, Anna Ramsey arrived Wednesday with her two children, who each left carrying plastic bags filled with 2 gallons (7.6 liters) of water.

“We have no water. We have no power. But I think it’s also been humbling,” Ramsey said.

Helene’s path through the Southeast left a trail of power outages so large the darkness was visible from space. Tens of trillions of gallons of rain fell and more than 200 people were killed, making Helene the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. since Katrina in 2005. Hundreds of people are still unaccounted for, and search crews must trudge through knee-deep debris to learn whether residents are safe.

It also damaged water utilities so severely and over such a wide inland area that one federal official said the toll “could be considered unprecedented.” As of Thursday, about 136,000 people in the Southeast were served by a nonoperational water provider and more than 1.8 million were living under a boil water advisory, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Western North Carolina was especially hard hit. Officials are facing a difficult rebuilding task made harder by the steep, narrow valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains that during a more typical October would attract throngs of fall tourists.

“The challenges of the geography are just fewer