During the drought of 1977, Chapel Hill ran so low on water that the university made a rule: no one except janitors could flush university toilets, and then only at 5 p.m.
We take few things so much for granted as access to a reliable supply of water. We drink water, use water to cook, take daily showers, wash our dishes, brush our teeth, do our laundry, and sprinkle our lawns—usually without even thinking about how much water we’re using. We don’t want to hear about the arcane details of water supply systems or think about water conservation.
But with extreme drought parching the state and meteorologists predicting an unusually dry winter, all of a sudden water seems like a precious resource.
As the drought has has worsened, I have been bewildered by the widely differing approaches that the Triangle’s cities have taken regarding water restrictions.
Confusing Local Responses
Durham had no mandatory water restrictions until Sept. 21; Raleigh has slowly implemented increasing water restrictions; Chapel Hill, served by the conservation-conscious OWASA, has the same water restrictions that always are in effect.
The myriad of different municipal responses to the drought left me confused. Aren’t we all suffering from the same degree of drought and dependent to some degree on the same rivers and streams for our water? Should there be state or regional planning to ensure a coordinated response to the drought?
In the last week, Gov. Mike Easley began using the bully pulpit to encourage communities to implement water restrictions. On September 13, Easley threatened to mandate statewide water restrictions unless communities implemented voluntary restrictions. On Sept. 20, Easley said communities should continue efforts to save water to avoid water shortages this winter.
A Call for Better Planning
Even before the drought, some North Carolina leaders in water resources were calling for more centralized long-term planning of water use. In March, about 200 people representing state and local governments, industry, and environmental organizations discussed the future of water in North Carolina at a conference in Durham.
“North Carolina has not yet responded to the pressures and competition for scarce water resources in the 21st century,” Bill Holman of Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions writes in a report summarizing the conference’s conclusions.
Water supply experts explain that the reason the local responses to drought seem piecemeal is because municipalities control their own water supplies and are responsible for developing their own drought-response plans.
“It is piecemeal,” said David Moreau, director of UNC’s Water Research Resource Institute. “Each city develops its own standards and there is no enforcement,” he said.
Asked how confident he feels in how localities are managing their water, Moreau said, “There’s a lot of improvements that can be made, no doubt about it.”
Moreau pointed to a need for better analysis of trends in water use at the local level. Municipalities “are not as well-informed on what kind of risk they’re facing as they ought to be.”
Ad Hoc System
The water supply system in North Carolina has been an ad hoc system from the start. “Historically, the state has done very little in terms of building water supplies,” Moreau said. Instead local governments have had that responsibility. Over time, as the Triangle area communities have grown, their water supply systems have become more interconnected, said Sydney Miller, water resources program manager at Triangle J Council of Governments.
Still, the belief persists that local management of water is best. Because communities in different areas have different population sizes, different types of water demand, different sources of water and different capacities for storage, they are best able to decide how to manage their water, the argument goes. “We believe at the local level is the best place to satisfy water supply and demand and what the response is” to drought, said Laurin Sievert of the NC Division of Water Resources.
Growth, Climate Change a Concern
But Holman says he believes that the state needs to be more thoughtful about planning to maintain high-quality, reliable sources of water in the future. Population growth and the prospect of climate change are two major reasons North Carolina needs to better integrate planning for water supplies, he said.
With the state’s rapid development, the same water resources that served 4 million state residents in 1960 will have to serve a projected 12 million by 2030, according to The Future of Water report.
In addition, climate scientists are predicting that global warming will lead to more unpredictable water supplies in the Southeastern United States. More dry periods could strain the state’s water supplies, while floods may be worse in developed areas with many impermeable surfaces like roads, parking lots, and roofs, according to the water report.
The bottom line? The state needs to do more “encouraging and requiring” practices that conserve and reuse water, Holman said. UNC Chapel Hill has been a leader in trying to capture stormwater in underground cisterns and using it to irrigate, said Holman.
A comprehensive state-wide plan could result in better decisions about water allocation. And water use and land use planning need to be better integrated, Holman writes.
One “thing we’re doing I’m sure we’ll regret is as we pave over farm and forest land, we’re preventing water from slowly penetrating into the soil and being a future source of water,” Holman said. “If we don’t change our development patterns and develop in ways that divert and capture rainwater, we’ll see more streams dry up in the future,” he said.
Green Triangle 