While the City of Asheville has restored potable water to its 63,000 customers, it’s still struggling with high turbidity at its main reservoir, North Fork.

Filtering that cloudy water remains a challenge, but major assistance is on the way this week in the form of a $39 million six-month project spearheaded by the Army Corps of Engineers to install a mobile filtration system at the reservoir. The city and the Corps planned to start testing the system this week, and Asheville Water Resources spokesperson Clay Chandler said it should be operational by Friday.

Chandler addressed the plan at the Monday Tropical Storm Helene briefing and then answered followup questions via email. Plans call for the system, which will be run by a contractor, to run continuously at North Fork Reservoir, which is located outside of Black Mountain and provides water to 80 percent of the city’s residents.

“Its production will start small, around 5 million gallons per day, and ramp up from there,” Chandler said. “Eventually, the Corps of Engineers system will do most of the heavy lifting, with North Fork’s existing processes providing support, to produce the average daily demand of 20-25 million gallons of water.”

The city restored untreated water to most customers in mid-October and potable water Nov. 18. But turbidity remains a concern.

“While North Fork has been able to meet system demand on its own for several weeks, we’re still one snowstorm or other especially windy weather event from the turbidity becoming unmanageable for our existing treatment processes,” Chandler said. “The Corps of Engineers system will provide a critical layer of security that will keep our customers in water should that happen.”

Chandler said the Federal Emergency Management Agency will cover the cost of the project.

Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson Patrick Moes said the North Fork Reservoir Turbidity Reduction Project contract was awarded to Ahtna/CDM Smith on Nov. 8.

“With respect to the design of the project, we provided the holistic performance requirements such as a gallons per day requirement (25 million), pumping requirements, etc., and the contractor executed the plan,” Moes said via email.

“The $39.2 million contract is for six months, with options to extend the work beyond the initial performance effort. The extension options include two additional six-month intervals, but we have not had those discussions at this point.”

Ahtna and CDM Smith have worked together on other projects. Ahtna’s website states the corporation is “one of 13 Alaska Native Regional Corporations established by Congress under terms of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.

“Based in Glennallen, Alaska, Ahtna, Inc. is owned by more than 2,000 shareholders, the majority of whom are of Ahtna Athabascan descent,” the site continues. “Many Ahtna shareholders still reside in the Ahtna region, the traditional homeland of the Ahtna people.”

Ahtna’s subsidiaries provide a range of services across many industries, construction and government contracting, according to the website. It works in all 50 states.

CDM Smith is a privately owned engineering and construction company that offers service in “water, environment, transportation, energy and facilities,” according to its website. Its world headquarters is in Boston.

After Helene caused extreme flooding and heavy runoff into North Fork, on Sept. 27, essentially turning the 350-acre lake upside down, the measurement of turbidity, Nephelometric Turbidity Units (NTUs), stood at 79. The raw water coming into North Fork, which is surrounded by a largely undeveloped 20,000-acre watershed, usually has a measurement around 1. By Monday it had dropped to 12.7.

The city has taken several measures to reduce turbidity, including three rounds of in-lake chemical treatments to help sediment coagulate and sink, and the installation of “turbidity curtains” designed to help still the water and foster coagulation of clay particles.

With the Army Corps’ help in constructing a pilot plant at North Fork to see what level of turbidity the reservoir’s direct filtration system can handle, the city discovered it was able to filter and treat higher turbidity water than previously thought. Initially, the city said turbidity would have to drop to the 1.5-2.0 level before treatment began, but it realized via the pilot plant that it could treat water with NTU levels in the teens.

The three in-reservoir treatment applications at North Fork involved dispersing aluminum sulfate, a coagulant, and caustic soda, which regulates the water’s pH levels to ensure optimum coagulation and sinking of clay particles. The turbidity improved, but it has been slow going: It remained in the 20s through October before dropping into the teens in November.

The water coming to customers’ taps is potable now and has a very low turbidity level, about .1, the city said previously. That’s well under EPA requirements.

‘Seasonal flip” may help turbidity

On Monday, Chandler noted another phenomenon that could help with turbidity: “the seasonal flip.”

“So, when the water gets really cold, like it’s about to get because it’s really cold outside, it does exactly like the term ‘flip’ sounds. It takes everything that’s on or near the bottom and puts it near the top, and takes everything that’s at or near the top and puts it on the bottom,” Chandler said. 

The city is fairly certain that a seasonal flip occurred at the Bee Tree Reservoir in the past few days.

“We believe that the reservoir at North Fork is going to do its seasonal flip sometime this week,” Chandler said Monday. “Bee Tree Reservoir did its seasonal flip, we are reasonably certain, last week, which drastically lowered the turbidity there — finally got it under 100 in the lower depths of the Bee Tree reservoir.”

It had stood near 500. 

Bee Tree, located in Swannanoa, is much smaller than North Fork, but the seasonal flip results are encouraging for North Fork, Chandler said, because if the larger reservoir sees a similar shift, it could significantly lower turbidity.

The city announced it was awarding the contract to the Army Corps on Nov. 8. Chandler said the Corps is delivering the filtration system on time, “exactly fitting the timeline that they originally gave us.” 

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s local reporting during this crisis is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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Asheville Watchdog is bringing you the stories behind the staggering loss of life from Helene, the children, parents, grandparents, multiple generations of a single family, all gone in one of the worst natural disasters to hit the mountains of western North Carolina. This is the ninth installment.  

The sorrow and torment are sadly familiar by now: A daughter desperately searching for her missing parents only to discover they were never coming back.

Nola and Robert Ramsuer died when floodwaters overtook their Swannanoa riverside trailer in Tropical Storm Helene.

But for daughter Shalana Jordan, getting to that agonizing answer took six weeks and included multiple searches through mud-caked debris, repeated calls to aid agencies, false sightings from well-meaning strangers, and a bureaucratic labyrinth that often appeared inept at tracking the missing and the dead.

Read previous installments of The Lives We Lost.

The Ramsuers, both 70, were among the 43 officially lost in Buncombe County to the Sept. 27 storm.

For loved ones left behind, navigating a chaotic disaster even with help pouring in from across the U.S. can be frustratingly slow and painful.

For Jordan, 40, of Winston Salem, it meant days of scouring social media posts and helicopter footage for clues about her parents, sending friends and relatives to shelters to see if they were there, providing DNA samples not once but twice, and waiting six weeks for confirmation that remains found within 10 days of the storm were those of her mother and father.

Jordan, mother of two boys, Aiden, 8, and P.J., 9, had to juggle their school needs and her own chemotherapy for a genetic disorder while searching for answers.

Holding onto hope amid the wreckage

On the morning of the storm, Jordan texted with her mother as she usually did. Around 7:30 a.m., her mother reported the power had gone out.

“She said it, like, almost funny…‘It’ll come back on again later,’” Jordan said. “She stopped texting me around eight.”

Jordan assumed her mother had gone to work at her custodian’s job at the Black Mountain Neuro-Medical Treatment Center. Her father, a Vietnam War veteran who had been in declining health, still worked a couple of days a week in maintenance for Cracker Barrel.

When Jordan couldn’t reach them that night, she figured they’d gone to bed early. The next day, images of the destruction began appearing on social media.

“I messaged all my family in Asheville, thinking maybe they called one of them and were with them, or maybe they didn’t have their phones,” Jordan said. 

Over the next hours and days, she searched a Swannanoa Facebook page, scanning photos of water pickup and donation sites for any signs of her parents. She watched hours of helicopter video footage and finally spotted her parents’ trailer park on Avery Wood Drive. Many of the trailers were gone. 

Benjamin Larrabee, the Ramsuers’ next-door neighbor, recorded videos of the floodwater surging through the trailer park, sweeping up semi-tractor trailers and pushing them downstream past the Ramsuers’ home. 

“Man, the whole trailer just moved,” Larrabee can be heard saying on one video as the water carried two semis past the Ramsuers. “Oh man, I hope these guys are going to be all right.” 

One of the trucks eventually crashed into the Ramsuers’ trailer, ripping off one end, Jordan said.

Inside, she said, the water came up to the hood above the stove; a couch had been lifted off the floor and landed on the kitchen counter.

Neither of her parents could swim. But their home was still standing.

Jordan held out hope that maybe they made it to a shelter but determining that proved no easy task.

“During all of the first three weeks, we were checking shelters,” Jordan said. “There weren’t any lists of who was in the shelters. I had to physically send people there while I was in Winston Salem.”

Jordan posted about her parents on social media and gave interviews to national media in hopes of generating leads. Her phone pinged non-stop with hopeful, but false tips.

“People message you and comment on your posts all day, every day, from six in the morning until 2 a.m. at night,” she said. “‘I think I saw them here. I think I saw them there.’”

Jordan made the two-hour trip to her parents’ home four times, traipsing through mud and debris outside and inside the trailer with relatives and her fiance, Edward Jordan. “The mud was so thick in one of the back bedrooms, I was like, what if they’re in here in the mud, and we’re walking over them?” she said.

Her own health made searching difficult. Jordan’s legs and ankles swell, and chemo leaves her weak and in pain, she said.

At one point, she injured her ankle in the remnants of the trailer. “I fell through the floor,” Jordan said, “because it was getting soft from all the mud and the moisture.”

Jordan called every government and aid agency she could think of to report her parents missing.

“Nobody would take a description of them. No one would take photos. It was crazy,” she said. “I know that it was an unprecedented situation, but FEMA, [the American] Red Cross, like they do this every day. Disaster is their only job.”

An arduous wait for confirmation 

Sixteen days after the storm, Jordan said she received a call from a Buncombe sheriff’s executive asking for a description of the clothes her parents were wearing.

Three days later, “I got a call from the medical examiner in Raleigh saying that they think they found my parents,” Jordan said.

She did not know then, but death certificates completed later showed her mother’s body had been found Oct. 4, and her father’s Oct. 7, more than a week earlier.

“We were hunting and wasting resources this whole time,” Jordan said, “if we could have been allowed to identify bodies, or if someone had been in charge of missing persons, to say we recovered X, Y and Z bodies.

“How many resources did I waste that could have been used helping someone else or finding someone else because we had tons of community help, people searching on foot, cadaver dogs, people shoveling out mud for us?”

Dr. Craig Nelson at the Office of Chief Medical Examiner in Raleigh told Jordan the bodies believed to be her parents still had to be transported to Raleigh for examination and confirmation, she said. 

Around the same time, the Buncombe Sheriff’s Office had been in contact with Jordan and sent a Winston Salem police officer to her home to collect DNA samples to match them against the remains.

The same day, about 20 minutes later, Nelson called to arrange to collect her DNA. Jordan told him, “They already came, and he was like, ‘What are you talking about?’”

Nelson said he would look into it and called back to say the first sample was headed to a Buncombe County lab, and results would take three to six weeks, Jordan said.

The Raleigh medical examiner’s lab could match the sample faster, in about a week, but she would need to provide a second round of DNA, “so more officers came and got samples,” Jordan said.

In early November, Nelson delivered the results.

“He said, ‘I’m so sorry,’” Jordan said. “My parents remains’ broke down too much during this process, and they couldn’t even get anything from their DNA samples.”

More samples were collected from the remains, and the medical examiner’s office conducted another round of testing. “We had to wait another week,” Jordan said.

She said Nelson “went above and beyond” and kept her updated daily. 

The medical examiner’s office did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

On Nov. 12, more than six weeks after the storm and five weeks after her parents’ bodies had been found, Jordan received official confirmation of their deaths.

By then, the family had already held a memorial service. Jordan said she did not want to wait with unpredictable winter weather approaching.

And she said she knew in her heart her parents were gone, especially after the discovery of a plastic bag inside their trailer with her mother’s purse, her father’s wallet, debit cards and mementos. She thinks they were planning an escape.

Also inside the bag: her mother’s cell phone, the same one she’d been texting and calling for days.

“She didn’t even have her phone,” Jordan said. “We were all just texting no one.”

Memorial brings unexpected costs, tributes

The Ramsuers’ funeral and cremation costs totaled more than $3,000 and included a “transport fee” to drive their remains from Raleigh to a funeral home in Swannanoa, Jordan said. “It’s $3 a mile to transport a body,” she said.

Cracker Barrel, her father’s employer, catered the memorial service and paid a portion of the costs, she said. The Red Cross paid the transport fee and other expenses.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency declined to pay, she said, because her father was entitled to funeral benefits as a veteran, about $300. With community donations, Jordan said the family expects to be fully reimbursed for the funeral costs.

Jordan said she’s heard from many of her parents’ friends, neighbors and co-workers, “the only good thing out of all this,” she said. “Not a handful, not dozens, but hundreds of people.”

Robert Ramsuer, a Buncombe native, served in the U.S. Army. “He saw a lot of crazy stuff” in Vietnam and served two tours after the war, his daughter said.

She described him as a spitfire who always had a story to tell. He loved fishing and hunting.

“People messaged me saying, ‘Your dad taught me how to fish 40 years ago; your dad taught me martial arts 30 years ago,’” Jordan said.

Nola Ramsuer was “very soft spoken and sweet,” she said. She baked cakes for friends’ and coworkers’ birthdays and hosted Christmas for their extended family.

One former coworker told Jordan how he’d talked to her mother about the many medications he was taking for lupus, an autoimmune disorder Jordan also has. Her mother went online and researched alternatives “and sent him these printouts of holistic things he could try to be able to get off all the medication,” Jordan said.

‘Life is so fragile’ 

Jordan recently collected her parents’ ashes from the Penland Family Funeral Home in Swannanoa. She said she purchased two memorial boxes, each a size large accommodating the remains of a 300-pound person, more than enough for her 140-pound father and 110-pound mother.

But Jordan said a funeral home representative informed her that her mother had been found in the mud. 

He said, “‘We tried to remove as much material from her as we could, but there still was a lot mixed in, so all of her doesn’t fit inside of the box,’” Jordan said.

She said she received two boxes with her mother’s remains. 

Funeral home representatives did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Jordan said that while her father had been ill, she expected to have another 20 or 30 years with her mother, who came from a family in which women lived well into their 90s, one making it to 104.

“I thought I had more time,” Jordan posted on Facebook. “Life is so fragile and can be gone in an instant.”

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Sally Kestin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. Email skestin@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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