Next Drought May Be Worse

By Brianne Dopart, The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C.

Dec. 14–DURHAM — Area leaders could soon be pressuring Gov. Mike Easley for funding to support regional solutions to the Triangle’s water crisis.

At a Thursday meeting, Triangle J Council of Governments Water Resource Manager Sydney Paul Miller told Durham, Orange and Wake county leaders that now is the time to lean on Easley for assistance in applying long, short and mid-term solutions to a drought that rivals arid conditions the Triangle weathered in 2002.

Forecasts predicting above normal temperatures and below normal rains for the foreseeable future mean that the Raleigh-Durham area will continue to see drought conditions through May, Miller said. While a hurricane or tropical storm could bring a fast end to the drought in late spring, Miller said the next drought the area sees will far surpass this one in terms of severity.

“Even if we do get relief this spring, water levels will drop faster this coming year than they did the year previous” unless Triangle residents change their behavior and Triangle leaders change their game plans, he said.

Some of those changes need to involve a change in the pricing of water and mandatory year-round conservation, said Bill Holman, former secretary of the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and now a visiting senior fellow at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

“This region in the past provided the leadership that really shaped the state’s [water management] policies, so I’m counting on you guys to do it again,” Holman said.

While a tropical storm may have freed the Triangle from the clutches of drought in 2002, the Triangle has gained half of a million people since then, Holman said.

“Your new source of water is going to be water efficiency,” he said. “You’d make a better case to go out of the region for water if you’ve shown you’re using the water you have wisely.”

One major effort leaders could take on immediately, said Miller, is a mass media campaign aimed at using the severity of this drought to convince area residents of the importance of changing their perspectives on water.

“It’s only in times like this that people get really excited and concerned and realize the value of water,” Miller said.

Despite the profound impact of the 2007 drought, Miller said recent studies have shown the crisis is not changing water users’ behavior. Most municipalities have seen a dropoff in water use attributed to both cooler temperatures and heightened restrictions, but Miller predicted that the dropoff was not “what it appears to be” and is not nearly enough to help the Triangle cope with the double threat of worsening conditions and rapid population growth.

“I don’t know if we call on celebrities or if we have to get the governor to show up in people’s living rooms nightly,” said Miller of how leaders could convince residents of water’s value as a finite resource.

Supportive of both the idea for a mass media campaign and the need for state funding, County Commissioners Chairwoman Ellen advocated for Triangle leaders to join together and present a united front as a means of helping each other help residents understand the dire need for further and long-term conservation.

“We really need to start putting out a unified message because it really starts to be noise if we’re not together on this,” she said.

Along those lines, area leaders discussed establishing consistent definitions for drought stages. Wake, Durham and Orange counties use different stages to denote different restrictions.

Reckhow said state money could help Orange, Wake and Durham fast-track capital improvement projects needed to access water and use it efficiently and proposed a matching program, in which governments would pledge 50 percent of funds needed with the hope that the state will kick in the other 50 percent.

While money was on Reckhow’s mind, the need to check what he called unchecked growth was on the mind of Orange County Commissioners Chairman Barry Jacobs, who told the council that the issue of the area’s ever-growing population was “the single most glaring absence in the discussion” about the drought.

“We have to start challenging our assumption that growth is unlimited,” said Jacobs, adding that valuable recommendations made by the N.C. Commission on Smart Growth have been all but ignored by local governments.

“The more people you put in the lifeboat, the faster it’s going to sink,” he said.

While the building of additional reservoirs and water-source connections are short-term solutions that may seem appealing, such reservoirs eat up the last of the region’s untouched natural areas, Jacobs said.

“If there’s a limited supply of something, you can’t continue to act like it’s going to go on for ever,” he said, acknowledging that changing the public’s perceptions would be difficult.

“We don’t think about these things here, it’s not an American way of thinking,” said Jacobs. “We think bigger is better. More is better. Well now, those fallacious assumptions are coming home to roost.”

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C.

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