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2 days agoAsheville is not regularly hit by hurricanes. It has been hit by 3 in 200 years and the previous 2 would not have been bad enough to cause this disruption. When the facility opened it was in large part due to that area having the cleanest water in America. At that time we didn’t need manmade filtration: the water from the spring was cleaner then anything humans could make. In fact, that spring still runs clean, but the demand for water has outstripped the output of that spring.
I do agree however that production of crucial supplies should be more decentralized in order to avoid mass shortages from any event.
Its also different attempting to hurricane proof on mountainous terrain. The winds were a little gusty bit nothing too out of the ordinary, at least where I was, the biggest problem was the wall of fast moving water. A downhill rush of 30 feet of water is very powerful and the tanker trucks and rail cars it swept up smashed all sort of things. A lot of the roads and some of the houses got washed out because the ground beneath them was swept away. About 40% of the trees are down in the area. If I remember correctly this facility is near Old Fort which is at the bottom of the mountains so all that water and debris rushing down and wiping out a very poor town of mostly trailers.