A Deluge of Rain Poured Out of the Heavens. But There’s Still No Drinking Water.

City officials have refused to provide estimates of when the devastated water system in Asheville, N.C., will be back in operation.

Since their home lost running water around 2 p.m. on Sept. 27 from Hurricane Helene, Etiska Jackson and her husband, Jayme, have been driving back and forth between their home in Asheville, N.C., and her brother’s in Madison County, about 25 miles north. There, they wash their clothes, take showers and fetch water from a well to flush their toilet.

“I feel like I’m camping in my house,” Ms. Jackson, 61, who works as a receptionist at the Charles George VA Medical Center in Asheville, said from the front yard of her bungalow on Friday afternoon.

For Ms. Jackson, the most troubling part of not having running water is not knowing when it may return. “They can’t even give us a time frame,” she said.

About a foot of water poured out of the dark, gray sky when the remnants of Helene inundated Asheville and much of western North Carolina. More than a week later, not a drop comes out of most people’s faucets. For many of them, it could be weeks before that changes.

Bottled water was the only potable water that residents of the city of 94,000 had as of Friday. A treatment plant capable of serving a part of the city that accounts for about 20 percent of its needs was back at full capacity on Friday and city workers were sampling water in pipes to see if it was safe to drink, said Ben Woody, the assistant city manager. Residents have been told to boil any water that does come to them, before drinking it.

City officials have refused to provide estimates of when full water service will resume. “I’m not going to provide a timeline, and I’m not going to provide a timeline on when I’ll provide a timeline,” Mr. Woody said on Friday. Water restoration is “going to happen incrementally across the community” with different areas getting water at different times, he said this week.

Helene knocked out huge pipes at the city’s largest reservoir that carried water to the rest of its system, as well as a redundant pipe intended to keep water flowing if the primary pipes were washed away.

The backup measures were installed to prevent a repeat of 2004, when storm damage caused an outage. There is also extensive damage to parts of the 1,000 miles of pipe that carry water to the system’s 155,000 residential and commercial users, Mr. Woody said.

Asheville’s predicament illustrates a challenge that local governments across the country face as climate change results in more extreme weather: Previous efforts to make public services less vulnerable to severe weather may not be enough, and more resilient systems could cost plenty.

Weather experts are still sorting through data gathered during Helene. But Corey Davis, an assistant state climatologist, said rainfall figures suggested that Helene was worse than a storm that an existing model predicted would happen once every thousand years.

But, he said, that model must be updated to take into account the increasing frequency of hugely damaging storms. In other words, storms like Helene appear to be happening more often than weather models predict.

Asheville officials made repairs after the 2004 outage “never dreaming we would run into something like” Helene, said Charles Worley, who was mayor at the time. “Nobody was talking something even worse.”

Esther Manheimer, the current Asheville mayor, said that after the 2004 outage, city officials “thought they were building the best they could build with the means they had at the time.”

“I don’t know how you can build a system that can withstand a 1,000-year flood situation like we just experienced,” Ms. Manheimer said.

“If you had all the money in the world, you probably could” meet that challenge, she added. But, she said, “when you’re a city on a budget of $250 million a year, you know, you can’t.”

Residents are struggling to adjust.

Laura McWilliams, a 35-year-old speech pathologist in Asheville, sent her three children, ages 5, 4 and 1½, to stay with her mother in Maryland after determining that life without water and other services in the city would be too difficult.

Before they can come home, she said, “I have to have water for bathing, doing the laundry, hand washing and things like that.”

She added: “It is just a very surreal experience not having resources” to keep her immediate family all in one place.

During the day, you can see Asheville’s water crisis on street corners and at parks throughout the city, where people are lined up at collection points clutching plastic gallon jugs. There, they get refills from volunteers who draw water from tanker trucks.

At Pack Square Park, just outside the Buncombe County Courthouse, the limit was two gallons per person, or five per family.

“I’m trying not to cry,” Maria Pugliese, 50, said as she approached the front of the line on Thursday. One of the volunteers, Eli Sheva Baron, responded, “Here, let me give you a hug,” and she did.

Ms. Baron gave another hug to an elderly man who had approached her and said, “Never in my life —” before stopping as tears welled in his eyes.

Asheville’s water outage is the most severe of those that have hit several local governments in western North Carolina, but drinking water has been in high demand across the region after Helene. That’s partly because other municipal water systems were knocked out by the storm, and partly because thousands of homes in the region had never been connected to a municipal system in the first place.

Most cities and towns in the North Carolina mountains are near streams and valleys. Providing municipal water to the many sparsely populated areas that are often at higher elevations would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, residents rely on wells powered by electric pumps — and electricity is still out in many areas, especially those with rugged terrain.

In Haywood County west of Asheville, “most of the county, I’m going to say probably 80 percent, depends on wells and a bunch of those are still without power,” Brandon Rogers, a county commissioner, said on Thursday.

Water problems were easing in rural and urban areas as bottled water distribution points had been operating for a few days by Friday. But even a case of bottled water isn’t enough for needs other than drinking water.

Howard Beddingfield, chief of Enka-Candler Fire & Rescue west of Asheville, said that when he drove around his district, “just about everywhere, if there’s a creek and a bridge, there’s somebody getting water out of the creek” to take home and use to flush their toilets. “I hope they’re not drinking it.”

Jenny Shealy, a psychotherapist in Asheville, has no running water at her home. She visited a friend who lives outside the city on Thursday night and took her first shower in a week.

“I’m trying to remember camping,” Ms. Shealy, 50, said on Friday. She worries that running water may not return for a month or longer. “What’s the community going to be like by then?” she asked, noting that she had heard of toilets not flushing properly and posing contamination issues.

A sustained loss of water would compound the area’s economic disaster, said John Winkenwerder, head of a local company that owns five Hilton-branded hotels in the Asheville area. October is one of the most profitable months of the year for tourism-related businesses, as visitors descend on the region to see the fall foliage.

Mr. Winkenwerder didn’t want to discuss how many visitors his hotels might lose if guests couldn’t take a shower. An ongoing lack of water would devastate the entire local economy, he said, preventing all sorts of employers from getting back to business.

“We’ve got to move at the fastest pace possible” to get municipal water flowing again, he said. He added: We can’t have that ongoing. We won’t have an economy. People won’t be able to survive.”

Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.