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When will railroad tracks get repaired here? Why so many water alerts? What type of clay is causing the turbidity problem? Could the city directly pipe the clear streams nearby? • Asheville Watchdog

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avlwatchdog.org – JOHN BOYLE – 2024-10-29 06:00:00

Today’s round of questions, my smart-aleck replies and the real answers:

Question: Will Norfolk & Southern repair their tracks? It’s such a sleepy industry, they may not be able to get a return on the investment. Rails to trails?

My answer: When it comes to repairs, I feel like Norfolk Southern is saying more, “I think I can, I think I can,” rather than, “Yeah, these tracks are toast. Time for rails to trails.”

Real answer: Norfolk Southern owns a lot of our tracks around here. Company spokesperson Heather L. Garcia provided the company’s update on Helene recovery.

“The short version is our track in and out of Asheville is expected to be out for at least another three months,” Garcia said.

The track is still used quite a bit, although Norfolk Southern does consider it “secondary” track, not part of its mainline operations. 

“Essentially, that means most of the traffic on that track is local (as opposed to through traffic), serving customers that are shipping goods out or bringing products in,” Garcia said. “Coal, forest and consumer categories make up more than half of the traffic in that area normally.”

In that update, Norfolk Southern said all of its “core routes were open within 72 hours of the hurricane making landfall.” The railroad has 19,500 miles of track in 22 states, mostly in the East.

Norfolk Southern said it has discovered 21,500 feet of railroad track that washed out from Tropical Storm Helene, and more than 50,000 feet of track damaged by scouring. Some of the worst damage was in the Asheville area. // Photo provided by Norfolk Southern.

“Norfolk Southern’s Engineering team cleared over 15,000 trees, repaired multiple washouts and over 50 damaged slide fences, deployed 400-plus generators, and safely operated in more than 1,000 locations without commercial power,” the update stated.

The update notes that the Asheville region was hard hit.

“In the hardest hit areas, along Norfolk Southern’s AS Line, which runs from Salisbury, N.C to Morristown, Tenn., crossing the Eastern Continental Divide through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Asheville, N.C., initial damage assessments discovered 21,500 feet of track washed out, more than 50,000 feet of track damaged by scour, over 15,000 feet of fill failures and slides, and multiple bridges damaged,” Norfolk Southern stated. “Engineering teams reopened the AS Line between Salisbury, N.C. and Old Fort, N.C., as well as between Newport, Tennessee and Morristown, Tennessee, Oct. 9, working, in some cases, without access to public roadways.”

Because of the remoteness and mountain topography, along with storm flooding, “Norfolk Southern teams have had difficulty assessing damage along portions of the line around Asheville and over Black Mountain, where much track has been completely destroyed,” the company stated. 

This map shows the status of the Norfolk Southern AS Line, which runs from Morristown, Tennessee, to Salisbury, North Carolina. “Initial projections estimate Norfolk Southern’s line between Asheville and Newport will reopen by late January 2025,” according to the company’s update. // Credit: Norfolk Southern

“Initial projections estimate Norfolk Southern’s line between Asheville and Newport will reopen by late January 2025,” the update continued. “Evaluations of the track between Asheville and Old Fort are ongoing.”

Blue Ridge Southern Railway, under its parent company, Watco, also operates tracks in our area, running from East Flat Rock up to Asheville, and then west to Dillsboro. The “WAMX” locomotives you often see around here, which stand for Webb Asset Management, are part of the Blue Ridge Southern Railroad.

The Blue Ridge Southern line consists of 87.83 miles of track, according to Watco spokesperson Tracie VanBecelaere.

“The Blue Ridge Southern Railroad is working to restore the line to resume service to our customers,” VanBecelaere said via email. “We do not have an exact timeline right now on when work will be completed, but hopefully in a similar timeframe as Norfolk Southern.”

As far as any potential transitioning of tracks to pedestrian/cycling trails, that’s not happening.

“There is no discussion of trail projects resulting from the storm,” VanBecelaere said.

Question: I appreciate the city being responsive during this crisis, but do they really need to send out so many alerts about the water? It’s starting to drive me crazy.

My answer: Alert! Alert! Alert! An Alert answer is coming. Hey, I just wanted to warn you.

Real answer: Asheville City Manager Debra Campbell broached this subject at the Oct. 21 daily Helene briefing. In short, the city must issue these notices.

“We’ve heard a lot, and a lot of it were mostly complaints that there’s been some frustration with the daily AVL alert messages going out to Asheville water customers as we continue to bring the entire water system back online,” Campbell said. “These daily boil water notices are required by the Environmental Protection Agency.”

“As long as we are under a boil water notice, we appreciate your understanding of the necessity of these critical messages,” Campbell continued. “These alerts are sent in both English and Spanish to ensure we reach as many members of our community as possible.”

Asheville has restored water to nearly all its customers, but the water is not filtered, and it’s heavily chlorinated and can have a light brown appearance. This stems from stubborn suspended clay particles remaining in the city’s main drinking water source, North Fork Reservoir in Black Mountain.

Question: (Note: Two readers asked about the turbidity issue at North Fork Reservoir. I’m summarizing their questions here). One guy said he filtered the city water through three towels, and it still came through with a brownish color, and yet there seemed to be no residue left behind on the towels. This indicated to him that the particles in question are incredibly fine. Along those lines, another guy, with experience in pottery, asked if the type of clay in the reservoir might be something called “terra sigillata.” Apparently, this is a fine clay used to create a smooth, lustrous coating on ceramic pieces, according to Google. His point is that it is a very, very fine clay and stays in suspension for a long time. He wanted more specifics on the suspended clay the city is dealing with, other than just generic clay. Also, he asked if the curtains to be installed are effective on very fine clay particles. And, how small a particle can they filter?

My answer: I’ve yet to hear the city’s water spokesperson, Clay Chandler, acknowledge the awkwardness of being named “Clay” these days, but I suspect that’s coming. I also suspect he’s already had some people blame him personally for muddying the waters.

Real answer: Chandler said the particles in North Fork that are causing the murkiness, technically called turbidity, are “very fine clay particles and generally require a coagulant to remove.

Normally clear, the North Fork Reservoir now suffers from murkiness, otherwise known as turbidity. // Photo provided by the City of Asheville

“A towel is porous, with those pores being large enough that they would most likely be unable to trap or contain those particular particles,” Chandler said via email. “Our personnel have not identified the specific clay particle, and use that term generically to describe many variations.”

They clearly have looked at this clay up close and personal, though.

“We do know that these particles are small, flat, plate-like structures, with a negative charge, and they act as opposing magnets, which keeps them suspended in the reservoir,” Chandler said.

Regarding the turbidity curtains, which the city is installing this week, they “are impervious in areas, but are mostly intended to create a stilling zone to allow flocculation and mass building, which we hope will help these particles sink,” Chandler said.

Flocculation is a fancy way to describe a process that causes small particles in a liquid to clump together into larger clusters called flocs. Hey, that’s what Google AI tells me.

Floc away, Asheville!

Question: As the feeder streams to North Fork have cleared, has the city explored the possibility, maybe in conjunction with the Corps of Engineers, of directly piping the stream water into the treatment facility, essentially bypassing the lake? Is this possible? Too complex?

My answer: At this point, I think the city has explored every possible solution to restoring potable water to its citizens, including buying gigantic tanks of hydrogen and oxygen and leaving them in a room overnight, hoping some magic occurs.

Real answer: This would probably be too complicated to seriously consider.

“Lot of problems to solve,” Chandler said. “None of those feeder streams are very deep, so you’d run into the capacity issue there, too. Also, they’re all in the middle of thick forest, and getting what would likely require a few miles of connected pipe laid and stabilized would take a significant amount of time.”

Also, the terrain provides no good place to set up dozens of pumps and other equipment that would be required to make this work.


Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Got a question? Send it to John Boyle at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org or 828-337-0941. His Answer Man columns appear each Tuesday and Friday. 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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Analysis: ‘Valley’ of AI journey risks human foundational, unique traits | National

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www.thecentersquare.com – By Alan Wooten | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-04-02 14:21:00

(The Center Square) – Minority benefit against the majority giving up “agency, creativity, decision-making and other vital skills” in what is described as a valley of an artificial intelligence journey is likely in the next few years, says one voice among hundreds in a report from Elon University.

John M. Stuart’s full-length essay, one of 200 such responses in “Being Human in 2035: How Are We Changing in the Age of AI?,” speaks to the potential problems foreseen as artificial intelligence continues to be incorporated into everyday life by many at varying levels from professional to personal to just plain curious. The report authored by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie of Elon’s Imagining the Digital Future Center says “the fragile future of some foundational and unique traits” found only in humans is a concern for 6 in 10.

“I fear – the time being – that while there will be a growing minority benefitting ever more significantly with these tools, most people will continue to give up agency, creativity, decision-making and other vital skills to these still-primitive AIs and the tools will remain too centralized and locked down with interfaces that are simply out of our personal control as citizens,” writes Smart, a self-billed global futurist, foresight consultant, entrepreneur and CEO of Foresight University. “I fear we’re still walking into an adaptive valley in which things continue to get worse before they get better. Looking ahead past the next decade, I can imagine a world in which open-source personal AIs are trustworthy and human-centered.

“Many political reforms will reempower our middle class and greatly improve rights and autonomy for all humans, whether or not they are going through life with PAIs. I would bet the vast majority of us will consider ourselves joined at the hip to our digital twins once they become useful enough. I hope we have the courage, vision and discipline to get through this AI valley as quickly and humanely as we can.”

Among the ideas by 2035 from the essays, Paul Saffo offered, “The first multi-trillion-dollar corporation will employ no humans except legally required executives and board, have no offices, own no property and operate entirely through AI and automated systems.”

Saffo is a futurist and technology forecaster in the Silicon Valley of California, and a consulting professor at the School of Engineering at Stanford.

In another, Vint Cerf wrote, “We may find it hard to distinguish between artificial personalities and the real ones. That may result in a search for reliable proof of humanity so that we and bots can tell the difference.”

Cerf is generally known as one of the “fathers of the internet” alongside Robert Kahn and for the internet protocol suite, colloquially known as TCP/IP.

Working alongside the well-respected Elon University Poll, the survey asked, “What might be the magnitude of overall change in the next decade in people’s native operating systems and operations as we more broadly adapt to and use advanced AIs by 2035? From five choices, 61% said considerable (deep and meaningful change 38%) and dramatic (fundamental, revolutionary change 23%) and another 31% said moderate and noticeable, meaning clear and distinct.

Only 5% said minor change and 3% no noticeable change.

“This report is a revealing and provocative declaration to the profound depth of change people are undergoing – often without really noticing at all – as we adapt to deeper uses of advancing AI technology,” Anderson said. “Collectively, these experts are calling on humanity to think intentionally and carefully, taking wise actions now, so we do not sleepwalk into an AI future that we never intended and do not want.”

In another question, respondents answered whether artificial intelligence and related technologies are likely to change the essence of being human. Fifty percent said changes were equally better and worse, 23% said mostly for the worse, and 16% said mostly for the better.

The analysis predicted change mostly negative in nine areas: social and emotional intelligence; capacity and willingness to think deeply about complex concepts; trust in widely shared values and norms; confidence in their native abilities; empathy and application of moral judgment; mental well-being; sense of agency; sense of identity and purpose; and metacognition.

Mostly positive, the report says, are curiosity and capacity to learn; decision-making and problem-solving; and innovative thinking and creativity.

Anderson and Rainie and those working on the analysis did not use large language models for writing and editing, or in analysis of the quantitative data for the qualitative essays. Authors said there was brief experimentation and human realization “there were serious flaws and inaccuracies.” The report says 223 of 301 who responded did so “fully generated out of my own mind, with no LLM assistance.”

Results were gathered between Dec. 27 and Feb. 1.

The post Analysis: ‘Valley’ of AI journey risks human foundational, unique traits | National appeared first on www.thecentersquare.com

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Trump urged to reconsider order gutting agency that gives grants to libraries, museums

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ncnewsline.com – Shauneen Miranda – 2025-04-02 13:00:00

SUMMARY: On March 14, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to dramatically reduce funding for seven federal agencies, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which awarded $266.7 million in 2024. The order aims to eliminate non-essential functions and cut agency personnel to legal minimums. The move sparked backlash from library and museum organizations, warning it would severely impact early literacy programs, internet access, job assistance, and community services. Critics urged Congress to intervene, while the administration framed the cuts as part of efforts to reduce government waste under the U.S. DOGE Service initiative led by Elon Musk. 

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Raleigh City Council discusses transforming area near Lenovo Center, hears concerns

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www.youtube.com – ABC11 – 2025-04-02 08:44:01


SUMMARY: Raleigh City Council is considering a major redevelopment project near the Lenovo Center that would create a new sports and entertainment district with high-rise buildings, restaurants, shops, and upgraded arena facilities. The proposal, supported by city leaders and the Carolina Hurricanes—who agreed to stay for 20 more years—has drawn both excitement and concerns. Students and staff from nearby Cardinal Gibbons High School support the project but worry about pedestrian safety and construction impacts. City leaders suggested annual reviews to address ongoing issues. The council postponed rezoning decisions until April 15 to allow for more discussion and public input.

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New details are emerging about the bold new development that could transform the area around Raleigh’s Lenovo Center, creating a new entertainment district around the arena in west Raleigh.

More: https://abc11.com/post/raleigh-city-council-will-discuss-future-including-wake-bus-rapid-transit-project-housing-security/16114907/
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