NY Times, October 16, 2007
Drought-Stricken South Facing Tough Choices
By BRENDA GOODMAN
ATLANTA, Oct. 15 — For the first time in more than 100 years, much of
the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought,
climatologists said Monday, creating an emergency so serious that some
cities are just months away from running out of water.
In North Carolina, Gov. Michael F. Easley asked residents Monday to stop
using water for any purpose “not essential to public health and safety.”
He warned that he would soon have to declare a state of emergency if
voluntary efforts fell short.
“Now I don’t want to have to use these powers,” Mr. Easley told a
meeting of mayors and other city officials. “As leaders of your
communities, you know what works best at the local level. I am asking
for your help.”
Officials in the central North Carolina town of Siler City estimate that
without rain, they are 80 days from draining the Lower Rocky River
Reservoir, which supplies water for the town’s 8,200 people.
In the Atlanta metropolitan area, which has more than four million
people, worst-case analyses show that the city’s main source of water,
Lake Lanier, could be drained dry in 90 to 121 days.
The hard numbers have shocked the Southeast into action, even as many
people wonder why things seem to have gotten so bad so quickly.
Last week, Mayor Charles L. Turner of Siler City declared a water
shortage emergency and ordered each “household, business and industry”
to reduce water use by 50 percent. Penalties for not complying range
from stiff fines to the termination of water service.
“It’s really alarming,” said Janice Terry, co-owner of the Best Foods
cafeteria in Siler City. To curtail water use, Best Foods has swapped
its dishes for paper plates and foam cups.
Most controversially, it has stopped offering tap water to customers,
making them buy 69-cent bottles of water instead. “We’ve had people walk
out,” Ms. Terry said. “They get mad when they can’t get a free glass of
water.”
For the better part of 18 months, cloudless blue skies and high
temperatures have shriveled crops and bronzed lawns from North Carolina
to Alabama, quietly creating what David E. Stooksbury, the state
climatologist of Georgia, has dubbed “the Rodney Dangerfield of natural
disasters,” a reference to that comedian’s repeated lament that he got
“no respect.”
“People pay attention to hurricanes,” Mr. Stooksbury said. “They pay
attention to tornadoes and earthquakes. But a drought will sneak up on you.”
The situation has gotten so bad that by all of Mr. Stooksbury’s measures
— the percentage of moisture in the soil, the flow rate of rivers,
inches of rain — this drought has broken every record in Georgia’s history.
Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta, at a news conference last week,
begged people in her city to conserve water. “Please, please, please do
not use water unnecessarily,” Ms. Franklin said. “This is not a test.”
Others wondered why the calls to conserve came so late.
“I think there’s been an ostrich-head-in-the-sand syndrome that has been
growing,” said Mark Crisp, an Atlanta-based consultant with the
engineering firm C. H. Guernsey. “Because we seem to have been very,
very slow in our actions to deal with an impending crisis.”
Mr. Crisp is among a chorus of experts who have warned for years that
Atlanta is asking too much of Lake Lanier, a situation quickly being
compounded by an absence of rain.
Many had hoped that hurricane season, as it has in the past, would bring
several soaking storms to the Southeast to replenish reservoirs that are
at or near all-time lows. But the longed-for rains never materialized,
and now in October, traditionally the driest month, significant rainfall
remains out of the picture.
“We’re in a stressful situation now,” Mr. Crisp said, “but come next
spring, if we don’t have substantial rainfall this winter, these
reservoirs are not going to refill.”
That would leave metro Atlanta dry in the summer, which traditionally
has the highest water use of the year.
Others pointed to the Southeast’s inexperience with drought and to
explosive growth in population as complicating factors.
“In the West, people expect that it’s dry, and you’re going to have
drought situations,” said Michael J. Hayes, director of the National
Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “In the
Southeast, people think of it as being wet, and I think that mindset
makes it tougher to identify worst-case scenarios and plan to that level.”
“Here’s the fly in the ointment,” Mr. Hayes added. “The vulnerability in
the Southeast has changed. Population shifts, increased competition and
demand for water has increased, so that’s made this drought worse than
it might have been.”
Within two weeks, Carol Couch, director of the Georgia Environmental
Protection Division, is expected to send Gov. Sonny Perdue
recommendations on tightening water restrictions, which may include
mandatory cutbacks on commercial and industrial users.
If that happens, experts at the National Drought Mitigation Center said,
it would be the first time a major metropolitan area in the United
States had been forced to take such drastic action to save its water supply.
“The situation is very dire,” Mr. Hayes said.
