25d ‎(2)‎

• Board Meeting Date: 11/18/2007
• Description: CWCB Director's Report
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

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DROUGHT-STRICKEN SOUTH FACING TOUGH CHOICES:
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For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeastern U.S. has reached the most severe
category of drought, 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 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. 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.
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."
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.
Many had hoped that hurricane season, as it has in the past, would bring several soaking storms to the
Southeast to replenish resen~oirs 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. 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
Flood Protection • Water Project Planning and Finance • Stream and Lake Protection
Water Supply Protection • Conservation Plaiming