Pipe break leaves dozens of Asheville residents without water for hours

A pipe break on Sweeten Creek Road left a few dozen Asheville households without water for hours Saturday, and some customers were still waiting by evening as crews worked through a complicated repair. The outage hit a residential stretch of south Asheville, not a single property, making it a neighborhood-level disruption rather than an isolated plumbing problem.

City Water Resources Department spokesperson Clay Chandler said the break was especially complex, which slowed restoration. Crews had begun the process of bringing service back around 8:30 p.m., and the city told residents to expect water to return about an hour or so after the final stage of repairs. The timing left many families dealing with a full day of interruption before taps could turn back on.

The outage landed on Sweeten Creek Road, a two-lane commuter corridor that links South Asheville to downtown and also serves as an alternate route to Hendersonville Road. That makes it one of the city’s more important southside travel corridors, and problems along the road can ripple beyond the homes directly affected. For residents caught in Saturday’s outage, the immediate issue was basic daily life: cooking, cleaning, bathing and other routine tasks all become harder when service drops without warning.

The break also comes against a backdrop of continuing concern about Asheville’s water system. The city owns 22,500 acres of forested mountains around its primary watershed and operates three treatment plants, North Fork, William DeBruhl and Mills River, a reminder of how much infrastructure sits behind a kitchen faucet. City advisories and outage listings are frequently refreshed, but the city says they may not be updated in real time, and residents can sign up for AVL Alert to get immediate notices about outages and advisories.

The latest interruption follows a stretch of heightened attention after Hurricane Helene left some Asheville residents without clean drinking water for 53 days. The city’s archived update from the December 2022 water outage also showed how slow recovery can be even after pressure returns, with customers still reporting discolored or cloudy water, uneven pressure and delayed full restoration in some areas.