[Saturday, 10:30 AM: I'm finally back home in Durham after spending the last two days either at BlogWorld, the airport or in the air. Need. Sleep. The item below I wrote a few days ago, but wanted feedback from folks out there who are in drought areas.]
One town knows what will happen. We're under drought conditions here in NC; while the water problems in Florida, Alabama and Georgia have been making headlines, all folks living in areas that need a ton of rain need to take a look at what is happening in Orme, Tennessee — the taps have run dry. (AP):
As I said above, the situations in Florida, Alabama and Georgia are bad — even getting ugly. Water wars have emerged and the governors of those states wanted the feds to intervene.The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to pass: The water has run out.
The mighty waterfall that fed the mountain hamlet has been reduced to a trickle, and now the creek running through the center of town is dry.
Three days a week, the volunteer fire chief hops in a 1961 fire truck at 5:30 a.m. — before the school bus blocks the narrow road — and drives a few miles to an Alabama fire hydrant. He meets with another truck from nearby New Hope, Ala. The two drivers make about a dozen runs back and forth, hauling about 20,000 gallons of water from the hydrant to Orme's tank.
“I'm not God. I can't make it rain. But I'll get you the water I can get you,” Reames tells residents.
Between 6 and 9 every evening, the town scurries. Residents rush home from their jobs at the carpet factories outside town to turn on washing machines. Mothers start cooking supper. Fathers fill up water jugs. Kids line up to take showers.
“You never get used to it,” says Cheryl Evans, a 55-year-old who has lived in town all her life. “When you're used to having water and you ain't got it, it's strange. I can't tell you how many times I've turned on the faucet before remembering the water's been cut.”
“You have to be in a rush,” she says. “At 6 p.m., I start my supper, turn on my washer, fill all my water jugs, take my shower.”
Alabama Gov. Bob Riley and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist previously had fought Georgia's effort to keep more water, arguing that its demands were unreasonable and that reducing river flows could cripple their economies.Do you know where your water resources come from? Are they shared with other states? I can see the problem getting ugly fast as one community charges another with waste and cuts the tap off.On Thursday, they accepted the recommendation, but only as part of continuing negotiations.
…The dispute centers on how much water the Corps of Engineers holds back in federal reservoirs near the head of two river basins in north Georgia that flow south into Florida and Alabama.
The fast-growing Atlanta region relies on the lakes for drinking water. But power plants in Florida and Alabama depend on healthy flows in the rivers, as do farms, commercial fisheries, industrial users and municipalities. The corps also is required to release adequate flows to ensure habitats for species protected by the Endangered Species Act.
One controversy here, and I assume it’s true elsewhere, is that the city wanted to require private subdivisions to restrict lawn watering. One news report aired said that some homeowner covenants require people to maintain their lawns (not only height, but quality/color of grass, etc.) and the city apparently cannot force the issue. This is insane.
36 Responses to “If people don’t stop wasting water…”
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Of course the city can force the issue — the covenant allows the subdivision to sue homeowner who fail to comply. So the subdivisions can simply omit to sue and everything will be fine. Or face suits to dissolve them. This is like saying that no one could force the issue about covenants not to sell to blacks or jews.
But yeah, when the almighty issue of Property is at stake, who cares whether people have enough water to drink…
Mandatory lawn watering should have been out the window awhile ago. We had a far less severe drought in Cleveland when I was a child, and f I recall correctly you could have been fined if they caught you watering your lawn. I remember my Mom finally caving in and letting us play in a sprinkler for 10 minutes once.
People are nuts.
Our big water dispute in my area is the constant infighting between Cleveland and Akron over who gets to do what with the Cuyohoga.
I’ve lived all my life around the great lakes - grew up in Michigan, a decade in Chicago, and now I live in Northern Minnesota - and I don’t know if it is “blue state environmentalism” or a long progressive tradition, or awareness that people in less water rich ares periodically suggest pumping out the lakes for their own benefit, or what, exactly, leads to the water awareness - but almost as soon as we hit ‘less rainfall than average for this summer month’ people - generally - stop watering non-essential stuff, like their grass. And as conditions dry, conservation ratchets up.
Where I am currently, we were in a three-year rainfall low until early this past fall, and not only was it constant fodder for news and neighbor talk, so were standard conservation measures. While long-term sustainability is not as central to discussions of new development as I’d like it to be - it isn’t absent and is governed by regulation (inconsistently enforced, etc… ).
As a result, the head-in-the-sand attitude of the southeast - at least as it filtered through the news up here - during their several year shortfall and ensuing draught conditions has utterly baffled me.
Kentucky is under a severe drought as well. Lots of the rivers and creekbeds are dry. Most of the deer herd as died as a result.
Parts of Alabama the red clay has hardened into brick.
Lots of farmers have gone broke since the cost of spraying water on them is more then they are getting taken in the crops.
I don’t understand lawn-people. Really.
People don’t have enough water to drink or wash in or perform basic household tasks, and they’re making rules that require them to water their grass so it looks green?
Why not plant somthing more drought-resistant?
I continue to wonder why anyone would willingly live in an HOA neighborhood.
Why not plant somthing more drought-resistant?
Because drought resistant plants aren’t “pretty.” It’s really hard to get that same kind of lushness with other grasses or plants, and people are really really really stupidly attached to the lush green water hogging Kentucky Bluegrass lawn. Even in states that have -always- been arid (Colorado), it takes a lot of work to teach people that xeric gardening -can- look really nice. Me, I wish xeriscaping was mandatory, esp. when places even hotter and dryer than Denver are lawn-crazed (Phoenix, Las Vegas, etc.). Total fucking waste of water.
**Because drought resistant plants aren’t “pretty.”
My NM joke:
Weeds are not xeriscaping. But they might as well be.
The approaches to use of water in different areas seriously baffles me. Where I grew up, in Massachusetts, we had a water ban every summer. Now I live in California, where we get a fraction of the rainfall, and no one ever seems to suggest anyone cut down their water use. I remember seeing businesses with their sprinklers on at noon in the middle of summer. I really would hate to see what would happen if we were in a similar drought situation to the SE, because people are just not used to conserving. And for HOAs to insist that people continue to water their lawns…that’s just crazy.
I live in a place with a large HOA, and we were on a water ban all summer. We’re not in the southeast, but there was enough concern in this part of the country that water restrictions were in effect from 6 am until midnight on weekdays and all weekend. So if you really wanted to water your lawn, I guess you could go out and do it at 3 am, when it would evaporate more slowly. Most lawns just went brown. I didn’t hear of a single case of anyone being charged for violation of lawn regulations. In past years I’ve seen it when grass has grown knee-high, but no sanctions for too little grass or brown grass for at last the past three summers. The HOA hasn’t given up on enforcing the rest of its covenants.
I don’t have a problem with HOAs. If a group of neighbors, no matter how big or small, want to get together and decide common rules for how they want their neighborhood to look and they pay property assessments to maintain shared spaces like playgrounds and walking paths, that’s great. Only if they try to keep certain people out of their neighborhoods, or if the covenants are harmful to anyone (and keeping grass green when others have no water to drink is certainly harmful) do I see a problem.
I live outside the boundaries of this HOA, but I get annoyed at people who complain about it, because there are plenty of neighborhoods in the area that are equivalent in every way except that they don’t pay the property assessment or get the services. If you don’t want to pay the assessment, move to one of those lovely communities down the street. Seriously, if you didn’t have a list of street names that are part of the HOA, you couldn’t tell if a house in this town is or is not part of it. I have friends who have intentionally bought outside the boundaries, and some who have intentionally bought within because they do want the services.
I think it all depends on the type of HOA. For example, my dad’s actually the president of the HOA for the small neighborhood my parents live in, and they don’t have uber-strict restrictions on things. It’s more like, don’t have cars in your yard.
That said, I’m from north-central Florida, and they are definitely having drought problems. We had most of the summer showers, but it wasn’t enough to really soak the ground. Watering restrictions (which aren’t enforced but are generally followed) have been in place for several years now. Sadly, we really depend on hurricanes and tropical depressions/storms to help make up for the water shortages other times of the year, because from where I am and south is very much wet/dry seasons, not spring/summer etc.
I grew up outside of Chicago and nell is right — any time there’s even a hint of a drought, most of the Midwestern states start conserving. I remember seeing signs at restaurants telling people they would need to ask for water because of a shortage back in the early 1970s. It’s been around so long that it’s part of the culture now.
Out here in California, the real culprits aren’t homeowners — it’s big agriculture, which is incredibly wasteful with water and is given no incentive whatsoever to try and use less wasteful irrigation techniques, much less conservation techniques.
But they spent a lot of money in both Congress and the state legislature, so they get to do pretty much anything they want while the rest of the state turns into tinder. Jackholes.
I’m in north Florida, and I see an awful lot of water being pissed away onto lawns (especially on commercially-owned land) every night. At least they have the good sense to do it during the day, but honestly… somebody needs to get some goddamned sense.
Sorry, I meant at least the have the good sense NOT to do it during the day.
Out here in California, the real culprits aren’t homeowners — it’s big agriculture, which is incredibly wasteful with water and is given no incentive whatsoever to try and use less wasteful irrigation techniques, much less conservation techniques.
Largely because they get their water very cheaply, but they have certain use-it-or-lose-it restrictions on their water rights. My econ class (doing an MA in policy) just had to do a case report on it, actually. It’s utterly ridiculous and outrageous on several levels, but it’s so entrenched that it’s hard to change.
That said, residential customers could be doing better. There are a number of apartment complexes around my neighborhood that water the sidewalks and turn the grass strips into sucking mud on a daily basis.
I have read other commenters (Ezra, possibly) who pointed out that although media coverage of droughts always focuses on individuals wasting water, in fact it is agriculture and industry who waste the vast majority of it. Somehow this never makes it into the papers or the mayor’s speeches.
It makes it into the papers sometimes.
Gee, why wouldn’t something about wasteful business practices make it into the paper?
The last water shortage in New York, there were all the articles about the 100-plus gallons a day used by the average resident (gotten by dividing the city’s water budget by the population) and one tiny squib about how some of the big air-conditioned buildings had switched to evaporators on the roof for their chilled-water supply rather than just running city water once through and out to the sewer…
I lived in Phoenix for about a year and a half in the early eighties and being from a small farming town in the Midwest, I was shocked at the wasteful water use — these people live in a desert, don’t they understand that? was all I could think. It was so strange that today I cannot figure out why restaurants would have signs informing that water was provided by request only “due to concern for water conservation” and a drive down any boulevard would see irrigated lawns, people washing their cars all the time, a swimming pool in nearly every backyard and more.
I also heard talk quite often from the locals there of the importance of draining the great lakes to feed their needs.
Here in the Northeast, which seems inundated with water, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone mention concern about water supplies, even though papers do report that reservoirs and water tables seem to be lowering.
Weeds are not xeriscaping. But they might as well be.
*rotfl* Well, yeah
One of the many endearing things about my SO is that his yard was almost completely covered with whatever wild things happened to grow there (along with a few shrubs from previous owners). It was really quite pretty and attracted lots of insects. I’m going to rip them all out so I can plant vegetables, but it was neat while it lasted.
More on topic: I’m hoping that Real Soon Now, there will be major movements toward using greywater for irrigation of lawns and other non-food plants. Or capturing rainwater that will otherwise just get flushed through the storm sewers. Or both!
If I was in charge of a government there, I’d say to the HOAs, dump the lawn regulations, don’t enforce them, or face threat of Emminent Domain. Fuck the idea that a lawn is more important than people having water to cook with! Californians have complied with restrictions on watering lawns, washing cars; people with older, non-low flow toilets are instructed how to put bricks in the back to reduce water use. (Those who say otherwise– either your local governments weren’t helping, or you weren’t around when drought years came in extended series).
But yes, agriculture is a real obvious issue. I do NOT understand rice fields in drought years. Acres of shallow standing water evaporate fast. Can’t they plant something else or leave it fallow when the rivers are so low the fish are threatened?
The approaches to use of water in different areas seriously baffles me. Where I grew up, in Massachusetts, we had a water ban every summer. Now I live in California, where we get a fraction of the rainfall, and no one ever seems to suggest anyone cut down their water use.
Massachusetts runs on groundwater wells or reservoirs. Since everything is town by town and there isn’t much regional management outside of the MWRA towns, many towns overdeveloped and outstripped their water supply.
California doesn’t get rain, but that isn’t where the water comes from. The bulk of California water is snowpack.
When TheGovernator saw projections of failing Sierra snowpack due to climate change, that’s when he flipped his lid and started to tell the Bushco to go fish. California depends on snow melt to fill reservoirs, so no snow means no water. Period. That’s what got him on board with CO2.
I grew up outside of Chicago and nell is right — any time there’s even a hint of a drought, most of the Midwestern states start conserving.
Yup, same here.
And I live in an HOA neighborhood, but nobody was stupid enough to write lawn regulations into the bylaws. Hell, the HOA-maintained common areas go brown and brittle before most of the homeowners give up, because our HOA stops watering the common areas as soon as we go on conservation restriction. (We usually go on “conservation” restriction–odd/even, allowed hours 7pm-7am–in early June; we’ve once gone on “stop” restriction with no watering allowed in late July/early August.)
If you want a quick overview of water shortage and interstate compacts in the west, there was a good bit in the NYT magazine a couple of weeks ago. And while it’s now a little dated, you really can’t beat Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert for the definitive look at the impacts of water policy in the west.
Now I live in California, where we get a fraction of the rainfall, and no one ever seems to suggest anyone cut down their water use.
Uh, if you’re in Southern California, I don’t think you’ve been paying attention to the commercials on the radio, the public service announcements on TV, and the little reminders that come in your DWP bill. Not to mention the press conferences by various politicians, including the Governator.
It’s not nearly as routine as it was in the Midwest as far as the culture goes (probably because Southern California has a pretty transient population), but the word is definitely out there. I originally moved out here in the middle of the last big drought (late 80s-early 90s) so I also remember all of the publicity from that.
Heh. The Southern California water conservation website popped up in the Google ads at the top of the page as I was typing that last comment!
I’m in Japan right now. Any story you’ve heard about how proverbially tight the Japanese belt can get is true. As for water, man it is so incrediby awesome. If I doubt hit, people might not have to do anything. In households, toilets have sinks on top of the tank. The water you wash your hands with flushes. And then bathwater doesn’t just go down the drain. The household bath is mostly for relaxing after a nice shower, so it ain’t a tepid pool of you own filth (ain’t tepid either). I’m not sure how my host family reuses the bathwater, but they pump it out of the tub by a big hose.
Going vegetarian would help curb water consumption. Most farm water subsidies go to water feed crops (crops for farm animals) not for vegetables and fruits for human consumption. Eat lower on the food chain and you save all kinds of resources, as well as human and animal lives.
Also related: The Farm Bill needs reform. No more big agribusiness money and water subsidies. Our corporate welfare system has to go. If we’re going to give handouts to farmers, let it be the small time, family farmers, not the industrial farmers (who overuse antibiotics and create incurable staph infections, who regularly contaminate ground water with farm animal feces, who produce food for human and pet consumption that’s been tainted with salmonella, e coli, and mad cow, who pay their workers very little and risk their lives needlessly, who confine animals to tiny space and never let them breath fresh air, step on grass, or live a normal life, who pollute the air with farm animal gasses… I could go on. Just google “factory farming” and learn for yourself.)
Check out these links for more:
http://www.perc.org/about.php?id=756
http://www.oxfamamerica.org/whatwedo/campaigns/agriculture
http://farm.ewg.org/sites/farm/index.php?key=nosign
The Piedmont Triad has some amusing problems. There is a reservoir to the north of the PT that offered to share water with the cities if they helped build it. Greensboro refused, but the other cities agreed.
Now Gboro has well under a hundred days of water left, and they won’t even start work on the station for the reservoir Gboro built until next year.
Mysteriously, all the public car washes are going great guns, but restaurants are banned from offered tap water. That’s a great solution, there! I know that restaurant water glasses must far outstrip the waste of public car washes!
That makes five consecutive days (so far) of freezing rain sound pleasant…
I’m truly amazed that in all the squawking I see about water shortages, I virtually never read one vitally important word:
Price.
CTD, let’s suppose (municipal) water was going for the same price per gallon as gasoline, just like you are implying.
How would that really help, especially considering that farming interests (as least here in Cali) would ensure they were exempted from paying those costs?
I can see it now - Mother to small child: “Sorry dear. I know the toilet stinks like crazy but we just can’t afford to flush it. Maybe you can do potty in the back yard…”
Let’s spread that Katrina lovin’ to everybody!…
Uh, bullshit on the “aren’t ‘pretty’” part.
I live in a semi-rural village outside of Albuquerque. The native ecotype is scrubland (sagebrush and four-wing saltbush) and the soil is something akin to beach sand.
But I have an absolutely gorgeous yard, composed of native and drought tolerant plants. From around May until, well, now (because it’s been unseasonably warm), my yard is a riot of color. A gagilion times “prettier” than a bland, monotonous lawn.
Well, Georgia will be all right now. Sonny Perdue is gonna hold a public prayer meetin’ with ministers and state legislators on the steps of the capitol, so you know the water is acomin’ back to Georgia after ol’ Sonny-boy gets to witnessin’. ‘cause he got his own se’f a powerful potent prayin’.
Yes, people do need to stop wasting water. But let’s back up and take a closer look at the drought itself and its effects on the Southeast. I am a native of georgia. Back in the 1960s, I remember when the stat’s population exceeded three million. Then, it was called “procgress.” We would never have dreamed then that there’d ever be a shortage of water in a state that recieved an average of 70 inches or rain per year. Bu rain fall has slowly declined over the years to the point to where 45 inches is now normal. As rainfall decrease, population has exploded. The Southeast is the new Florida and its population is growing faster than any other region of the country. Geogia’s population is now an astounding 9.3 million, with 5.2 milion in metropolitan Altanta alone. If what we’re being told by the U.S. DCensus is correct, metro Altanta’s population will soar to 15M over the next 20 years. We don’t have enough water resources to meet the currnent need, so where are we going to get water for an additional 10M people? North and South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama are also facing explosive population growth.
This drought IS caused by global warming regardless of what the politicos have to say about it. We here about the need to reduce greenhouse gases, but we never hear the cold, hard truth about the ultimate cause of global warming. The planet is overpopulated and we have far too many peope now trying to be American-style consumers. This is a recipie for disaster on a global scale. Our drought is only the tip of the iceberg. We can expect far worse over the next few decades. It would be pretty to think that immediate action to reduce greenhouse gases and to begin to contol population would be the solution and, indded, eventually it will be. But it is too late for us now.
I live in Birmngham Alabama and we have been living under strict water restrictions for two years so all the talk from Georgia about us not preparing for the drought is bull%^#$%. There is also a surcharge on water if you use over a certain amount. We only flush the toilet when necessary and we shower every other day, which is not fun when it is 105 degrees out. I have no grass in my yard and all my plants and shrubs are dead. I’m going to pull everything out and just throw down mulch next year. I have a 100 year old oak tree in my yard that will be dead by this time next year if we don’t get some water soon.