Open Source: In Asheville, the business at hand isn’t business. But it’s still important.

I’m Brian Gordon , tech reporter for The News & Observer , and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.

The French Broad River was back in its regular place Wednesday, but much of surrounding Asheville wasn’t. The parts of the city that appear structurally sound, like downtown, still lack running water — and likely will for weeks. And the double wallop of heavy rains and then a tropical storm last Friday sent trees falling and waters rising.

Set along respective waterways, Biltmore Village and the River Arts District are two of Asheville’s starkest Helene casualties. The latter faced 10-foot floods. The former, as I walked through the area days after, displayed boarded up businesses, wayward metal detritus and crumpled storefronts.

Biltmore Village had been home to the fanciest McDonald’s I had ever seen, fitted with a baby grand piano, red oak tables and chandelier — all nodding to the opulence of the nearby Vanderbilt estate. The restaurant is now gutted. A major local tourism draw, the Biltmore Estate announced it will remain closed through Oct. 15, but any date within the next month feels like an ambitious guess given the area’s current condition.

Asheville runs on tourism but when and how to bring visitors back is a question for another week. Yesterday, today and tomorrow, residents are working out how they’ll flush toilets, shower, cook, bring groceries to neighbors and relatives, find the right dog food and shelter stray pets. Electricity is coming back to more of the city each day, but without water, the restaurants, breweries and hotels can’t open. What will that mean for their employees?

Manufacturing operations interrupted

Broadening out through a business lens, Helene has disrupted a handful of Western North Carolina manufacturing operations with significant supply chain implications. Top of the list are the Spruce Pine mines . The small mountain town in Mitchell County is where the purest quartz on the planet is found. When it comes to making semiconductor wafers that get cut into chips, even the smallest impurities can decrease performance. Spruce Pine quartz doesn’t have this problem. Few, if any, other places on Earth can make that claim.

On Monday, the two local mine operators announced they had halted operations as much of Spruce Pine was washed away. “Everything civilization is pretty much gone,” one local resident told my colleague Josh Shaffer. On Friday, the largest mine operator Sibelco said an initial assessment showed its facilities “only sustained minor damage.”

“Our final product stock has not been impacted,” the private Belgian company said in a statement. “We are working closely with our customers to assess their needs and plan the restart of product shipments as soon as we can.”

Another paused plant is in McDowell County, where Baxter International has the largest U.S. dialysis solutions facility.

“Baxter’s North Cove site was affected by flooding due to the storm and is currently closed for production,” the company said in a statement Sunday , adding it is working “as quickly as possible to help mitigate supply disruption to patients.”

Other Western North Carolina manufacturing plants are still operating, including the Cummins facility in Hendersonville and the Pratt & Whitney factory in Asheville.

Clearing my cache

• Who is more determined? Google and Apple are in one corner, neither appearing content to cede the market dominance their respective app stores hold. In the other corner is Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games , who has for four years battled the two tech giants over their alleged — and at times proven — unlawful app store polices. This week, Epic (which is based in Cary and created Fortnite) sued Google again — and this time Samsung, too.
• Wilson, North Carolina, is having a good two weeks. In late September, the Eastern North Carolina city celebrated plans for a future 280-worker Mucinex manufacturing facility. And on Tuesday, Wilson landed another pharmaceutical project , as a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary committed to building a 420-worker factory in the community.
• News I missed when on vacation: On Sept. 16, AT&T workers across the Southeast ended their 30-day strike after the telecommunications provider reached an agreement with the Communications Workers of America .
• Sliding doors. Hyundai looked at North Carolina’s Chatham County to build a massive EV factory but ultimately picked a site in Georgia. VinFast looked at that same Georgia site for its own massive EV factory but eventually settled on Chatham County. The two projects from the two very different car companies have contrasted sharply since.

• On a sweet note: Morinaga , the maker of HI-CHEW candy , has broken ground on its second candy factory in Mebane.

• Starlink satellites have reconnected emergency responders and residents (and journalists) in storm-battered Western North Carolina. Who should get credit — Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the Biden administration, FEMA, Ivanka Trump or, perhaps, everyone or no one — became a political issue this week.
• Speaking of post-storm communications, the Federal Communication Commission chair will travel to Asheville and Charlotte today to hear direct accounts of internet and cell restoration efforts.

National Tech Happenings

• Close to 50,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association have suspended their strike , which would impact shipments up and down the East Coast.
• The Department of Justice has sued Visa for unlawfully maintaining a monopoly “over debit network markets.” A monopoly in and of itself isn’t illegal, but a monopoly that harms customers is. The DOJ says that’s happened while Visa has called the case “meritless.”
• The swoosh is slumping. Nike is switching CEOs as the athletic brand seeks to rebound from a rough year on the stock market — and a dip in the less quantifiable concept of “cool.”
• On Sunday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the nation’s most extensive AI regulations to date. The state legislature had by a wide margin passed the guidelines, which included making companies liable for any harm their artificial intelligence models caused and requiring them to insert a “kill switch” in case their AI goes rogue.

In nixing the bill, Newsom called the rules “well-intentioned” but “stringent.”

Thanks for reading!