I'm sitting here in Charlotte, North Carolina. The weather forecast calls for ten days of "sunny", interspersed with a little "mostly sunny" and a lot of "plenty of sun". My lawn is dusty and brown, my 60 year old dogwood is dying because I'm not allowed to water it any more, and my major trees are starting to lose their leaves unseasonably early. It's still 90 degrees in the daytime and 60 at night; a first frost seems like a distant fantasy -- why, then, would the leaves turn color and fall?
The weather dramas of the last few years have mostly involved water, vast quantities of it, drenching cities, flooding buildings, washing people away. But down here in the southeast there's a weather drama quietly unfolding as well. Charlotte's Lake Norman is rapidly crashing towards its minimum due to a multitude of factors, one of which is a severe and persistent...
Lack of rain. The National Weather Service says 2007 has seen the driest conditions since 1895, making this, Fransen said, "a much faster-moving" and more intense drought than in 2002. That one, by contrast, was the result of the cumulative effects of four consecutive years of dry winters. Winter is typically when lakes and streams "recharge" with water.
Charlotte is 13.something inches "behind" average for rainfall at this time of year, spent 32 consecutive low-humidity days above 90 degrees in recent weeks, and the forecast of a warm dry winter for the South promises no relief. Charlotte is a rapidly growing small city, with approximately 2 million people in the city itself plus the surrounding county. Many of our energy needs are provided by four nuclear power plants in the region. One of these sits on (and is cooled by) Lake Norman, which is in a little bit of trouble right now.
The U.S. Drought Monitor now lists nearly all of the Charlotte region as being in "exceptional" drought conditions, the worst level possible. Federal weather forecasters also expect the conditions to continue, with areas needing from a foot and a half to almost 3 feet of rainfall over the next three months for the drought to end. Long-range forecasts offer little optimism.
If the drought worsens, Duke might have to decrease power-plant operations and buy power from outside sources, which is expensive. The region could also move into Stage 4 restrictions, which would require water-consumption cuts of 20 percent to 30 percent through steps decided by each community, according to a regional drought-management plan administered by Duke and a regional council.
We are literally weeks away from serious, serious trouble:
Last week, Mountain Island Lake dropped within inches of affecting the flow into Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities' main drinking-water intake valve. And Lake Norman is at its lowest allowable point without having to shut down Duke's McGuire Nuclear Station for safety reasons. The company needs enough water to make sure a backup safety system works, said Rita Sipe, a Duke spokeswoman. Duke's hydroelectric plants are already operating at about half their capacity because of the water shortage.
Power trouble, drinking water trouble. Two kinds of trouble that you do not want to have. Two kinds of trouble that could very well be fatal. No AC to cool us in the unusually persistent heat, and no water to drink, kind of trouble.
Charlotte's not the only Southern city with a problem, though. Atlanta, a metro with a much larger population, is months away from a severe water problem.
Atlanta's Lake Lanier stands more than 10 feet below full and could drop another 9 feet, leaving
In the worst case, the lake will drop another 20 feet, leaving just 4 feet of water storage and threatening the region's water supply. Whether metro Atlanta could continue drawing water out of the lake and the Chattahoochee River it feeds is anybody's guess right now.
Pat Stevens, chief environmental planner for the Atlanta Regional Commission, said losing Lanier as a water source would be to Atlanta what Katrina was to New Orleans.
"It would be on the scale of a disaster like New Orleans," she said.
Metro Atlanta's continued water woes beg the question of how the region can continue to grow the way it has. More reservoirs, which can take some of the load off Lanier, are almost certainly on the way.
But even with those, metro Atlanta will either have to find a new source of water or figure out better ways to conserve what's here.
Sally Bethea, executive director of the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, said when she was listening to the Corps' forecast, "What I was saying to myself is 'We can't have two million more people move in here. How is that going to work? ... Metro Atlanta is just not willing to put constraints on people's use of water."
Of course, none of these articles go on to say how the cities plan to manage a situation where we have no more drinking water, where the intake valves have risen above the surface of the lakes and the system can't be refilled. Power, of course, can be shuffled around from other sources. But water? Floods are rapid and dramatic and telegenic; drought and its potentially deadly effects are not something we think about unless it wipes out the corn crop, not something we particularly plan for. Are we going to build a pipeline from Southwestern Wisconsin where the fields are sodden and the farmers can't even get out to work (source: my uncle Marcus)? Is FEMA going to bring us water?
It's really getting a little scary down here. Millions of people in these major urban areas and in the smaller communities around them, and the very real spectre of not enough water to go around. We can shut down the public fountains and the water park; restaurants can stop serving glasses of water. I can shut off the tap when I brush. But, will that be enough? They say we'd need three feet (feet!) of rain in the coming winter months to recover from this drought. A week ago we got a scant half-inch and there's no rain, not even a cloud, in the ten-day forecast.