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“I
am very concerned about the water supply situation,” Wake Forest Fire Chief
Jerry Swift said this week, but the City of Raleigh, which owns the town’s
water system, has refused thus far to ban outdoor watering and car washing to
stretch the available water.
“We
already have a dry hydrant that is on dry ground out at the {Smith Creek}
reservoir because of low water,” Swift said.
“I
don’t know what we are going to do if the water supply situation gets worse. As
you know, we do not have a tanker to assist with water supply so I am not sure
what we will do.”
Fighting
a fire takes prodigious amounts of water. Swift said the house that burned last
week on South Main Street was about 1,000 square feet. “It would have taken
approximately 300 gallons of water per minute to extinguish this home had it
been fully involved.
“A
4,000-square-foot home in Waterfall would have taken 1,000 gallons per minute
for the same involvement,” Swift said.
This
week there is about 43 percent of the normal amount of water supply in Falls
Lake, the water for about 410,000 people in Raleigh and the towns where the
city owns the water and sewer systems: Wake Forest, Rolesville, Garner,
Knightdale, Wendell and Zebulon. The Wake Forest reservoir provides about 1.2
million gallons a day for some town residents.
That
43 percent translates to 113 days of water left. We will reach that about Jan.
23.
The
Triangle area and most of the state are in an extreme drought condition with
low or no flow in streams and falling groundwater tables.
This
week’s chance for rain will have little effect because it will likely be
widespread showers, if that. Weather experts say the area needs the four to six
inches a hurricane could dump plus 18 to 20 inches from a winter of days’-long
soaking rains. Their prediction is for a dry fall and winter with a La Nina
weather pattern dominating.
Water
use locally could be curtailed and the Falls Lake supply extended by the City
of Raleigh imposing stringent Stage 2 rules. When the City Council adopted a
mandatory year-round conservation measure that limited outdoor watering to
three days a week. Since then the city has imposed Stage 1 rules, which limit
watering to one day a week. The conservation measure also said Stage 2 rules
could be imposed when 50 percent of the water supply remains.
Raleigh’s
Public Utilities Director Dale Crisp was asked this week about going to Stage 2
and why the city has not done so.
Crisp
said water customers have reduced their use by 18 percent, using an average of
54 million gallons a day. In Wake Forest, Deputy Town Manager Roe O’Donnell
said, “Our monthly usage in September was about a third less than that of June.”
“If customer usage were to begin to increase or the weather were
to continue for a long period with no rainfall, those would be clear
indications that further water use management efforts are needed,” Crisp said.
“Stage
2 restrictions are very severe and the city must be sure that it is necessary
to move to this level of restriction,” Crisp said.
One
of the criteria for moving to Stage 2 “would be if the National Weather Service
could provide us a higher degree of confidence in their long-term weather
predictions,” Crisp said.
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