By Elijah Skipper
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BLACK MOUNTAIN, North Carolina (WLOS) — Nearly two years after Helene, a new concrete gate stands where an empty space had remained along North Fork’s auxiliary spillway.
The gate, known as P4, is designed to tip when the reservoir rises too high.
During Helene, it did.
The gate worked. The dam held. Asheville still lost water.
That contradiction now defines the next phase of the city’s recovery: one critical repair is complete, while two much larger projects intended to prevent another prolonged outage remain in design.
A gate designed to tip
P4 is the first of eight concrete fusegates designed to tip in sequence as the reservoir rises. The system is passive, meaning it does not rely on an operator, electricity or a motor. Water pressure beneath the gate eventually lifts and pushes it into the spillway, creating more room for water to escape.
“This space right here has been empty since about 9:30 in the morning on September the 27th, 2024,” Asheville Water Resources spokesman Clay Chandler said during a recent tour. “That’s when we think this fusegate tipped.”
To someone unfamiliar with the system, a missing gate could look like a failure.
Mark Landis, Schnabel Engineering’s project manager and engineer of record for the spillway project, said it was the opposite.
“Yeah, it did exactly what it’s supposed to do,” Landis said.
The city says the auxiliary spillway released enough water to lower the reservoir to a safe level and keep it from overtopping the earthen dam.
Crews began rebuilding P4 in June and reached substantial completion in early September, returning the auxiliary spillway to full operation. Asheville City Council approved up to $994,849 to replace the gate and repair other Helene-related damage to the primary and auxiliary spillways.
Protecting the dam did not keep Asheville’s water flowing.
Floodwaters destroyed the main distribution line carrying water from North Fork. At the same time, runoff and landslides pushed so much sediment into the reservoir that the water became too muddy for the plant to treat.
The city says the water would have remained untreatable even if the distribution system had stayed intact.
“[Helene] basically turned our entire reservoir completely upside down,” Chandler said. “It took everything that was on the bottom, shoved it to the top.”
North Fork was built around the unusually clear water produced by Asheville’s protected watershed. The plant uses direct filtration, sending water to filters without a permanent pretreatment step designed to remove extreme amounts of mud and sediment first.
“The bad part about that is our filters are designed to treat pristine water,” Chandler said.
Temporary pretreatment systems were installed after Helene to reduce sediment before water reached North Fork’s filters. Those systems stopped operating in November 2025 after FEMA operating funding ended and were removed in early 2026.
Asheville is now designing a permanent pretreatment system for North Fork. The project would add plate settlers and sediment basins that remove mud and other material before the water enters the plant’s existing filters.
Chandler estimates the project will cost between $130 million and $140 million.
“We’re working with FEMA through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program to design and build permanent pretreatment systems that will allow our filters to treat especially muddy water,” Chandler said.
Cleaning the water is only half the problem. Helene also washed out the 36-inch bypass that carried North Fork water into Asheville.
The city is now designing another transmission line that would be geographically separate from the existing bypass and, where possible, avoid the Swannanoa River floodplain. Asheville has begun contacting property owners along the proposed route about potential easements.
Chandler described the proposed line as about 6 1/2 miles long and estimated its cost at between $140 million and $145 million.
Together, the pretreatment system and alternate transmission line are expected to cost about $280 million.
For comparison, Asheville Water Resources brings in about $49 million in annual operating revenue, primarily through customers’ water bills. The two projects would cost nearly six times that amount.
The city says each project will require a mix of Water Resources funding and help from state and federal partners. It does not currently anticipate the projects affecting customers’ water bills, but final funding packages have not been completed.
Both projects remain in design.
The designs must reach 60% completion before they can be submitted to FEMA for review through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program. The city’s current recovery page says it expects both projects to reach that threshold in spring 2027.
Even after funding and designs are approved, construction will take years.
Chandler said either project could take about three years under nearly perfect conditions. He described five years as a more realistic construction timeline once weather, supply-chain problems and other delays are considered.
“Installing a water line that runs for about 6 1/2 miles takes some time,” Chandler said. “There is no shortcut, unfortunately.”
Other recovery work has been completed. Debris removal at North Fork concluded in spring 2026, turbidity has returned to pre-Helene levels, and the auxiliary spillway is fully operational again. The city cautions, however, that North Fork and Bee Tree remain vulnerable to prolonged severe or extreme weather.
Chandler said the first year after Helene still felt like immediate recovery – rebuilding damaged infrastructure, removing debris and stabilizing the system.
Now, he said, Asheville has entered “the long game.”
“Other than our customers turning their faucets on and water coming out day to day, that is the thing that I think about the most,” Chandler said of the two projects. “It’s unfortunately the last thing I think about before I go to bed at night, and the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. It’s an obsession because it has to be.”
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