Asheville: Water restoration won’t be complete Friday night

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — A western North Carolina city that faced water outages in recent days says that it won’t be able to meet its goal of restoring service to all customers by Friday night.

Asheville’s Water Resources Director David Melton said the city is making progress in restoring water service, but the system is complex and they must work carefully to avoid causing more problems. Continued water conservation is key to bringing full service back to all customers, Melton said at a news conference Friday.

As many as 38,000 customers in the southern part of the city have had water outages or boil water advisories in recent days after a water production plant went down amid cold temperatures on Dec. 24. That plant was restarted on Wednesday, but officials have cautioned that the process of restoring service throughout the system would move slowly to ensure safety.

As of Friday morning, 1,100 people have received drinking water from the local government over the last three days, Fire Chief Scott Burnette said. Deliveries will continue Friday.

Officials are still hopeful that the majority of people will have service back Friday, but Mayor Esther Manheimer said they don’t want to promise that because of fluctuations in the system.