Helene's Wrath: A Visual

The Washington Post has an interesting satellite view that expands slowly out into a map of the area northeast of Asheville, and then to all of the nearby areas centered on that region. Most of that area is National Forest, sparsely populated in part because it protects Asheville's reservoir lake. The down side is that lake has been murky and full of sediment since the hurricane, complicating the recovery for Asheville residents whose water system is not set up to handle heavy sediments. Normally that water is pristine, at least for city water.

AVI will have seen a lot of those worst-hit areas on his trip down here, the one where he and family went up to Craggy Gardens on the Blue Ridge Parkway. That road overlooks the North Fork Reservoir, the lake I was talking about above. 

Old Fort, on the map east of Asheville along the I-40 corridor, is still said to be in bad shape. Asheville itself remains troubled. 

UPDATE: 

As you would expect, the drying downed trees create a fire hazard that exactly maps to the worst of the hurricane strike. 



1 comment:

Gringo said...

For home use, I imagine there would be a 2-step process. 1) filter out solids, reduce turbidity, and 2) purify. I had good experience in Central America in purifying water with Polar Pure, which cost then and now about $20 for a bottle. You can get it at Wal-Mart. The purified water tastes like iodine, but that is a small price to pay for getting drinkable water. I had no intestinal problems from drinking Polar Pure-treated water. I used it for city water or for stream water. (I am told that in a town I knew well, that sometimes the city water is purified/potable, and sometimes it is not. Depends on whether the budget can pay for chlorine that week.)