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Asheville taps are clear to drink; boil water notice lifted

Asheville's North Fork reservoir remains too turbid following Helene to push water through filtration system.
City of Asheville
Asheville's North Fork reservoir remains too turbid following Helene to push water through filtration system.

After a 53-day water crisis, clean water runs through Asheville’s taps once more.

Asheville lifted its boil water notice this morning, city spokesperson Clay Chandler shared this morning at a press briefing.

The notice was lifted after the city’s water department tested 120 samples over the weekend. Turbidity is under 15 and the city expects it to remain low enough to process and meet demand.

“We thank you for hanging in there with us,” Chandler said.

People should avoid using “large volumes” of water for activities such as landscaping, filling bathtubs, excessively long showers, filling pools and watering gardens at this time.

The city experienced an outage of water following Hurricane Helene. The storm created high sediment levels at the North Fork Reservoir which provides about 80% of the system’s water supply.

The city has been flushing the system of untreated water for about a week, Chandler said. No raw, or untreated water, has been in the system since last Saturday.

Laura Hackett joined Blue Ridge Public Radio in June 2023. Originally from Florida, she moved to Asheville more than six years ago and in that time has worked as a writer, journalist, and content creator for organizations like AVLtoday, Mountain Xpress, and the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce. She has a degree in creative writing from Florida Southern College, and in 2023, she completed the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY's Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms program. In her free time, she loves exploring the city by bike, testing out new restaurants, and hanging out with her dog Iroh at French Broad River Park.