North Carolina is approaching its eighth month of drought. And it seems increasingly likely that we’ll see mandatory water restrictions put in place, something the state hasn’t seen since its worst drought on record in 2007.
WFAE’s Zachary Turner spoke with Bryan Walsh, the vice president of regulated renewables at Duke Energy, to learn what we learned from 2007, and what folks should expect as the drought continues despite some sprinkles this week.
Zachary Turner: In terms of rainfall deficit, we're approaching 2007 levels. Are we seeing similar levels of water scarcity as we experienced in 2007?
Bryan Walsh: Well, we're not there yet. But it's certainly something that we have on our mind. The good news is that we have a historical playbook from what we've seen from 2007 through 2009.
We have a protocol that guides when we declare certain low inflow stages. Stage 0 is just monitoring. We just declared Stage 1 recently, which asked for some voluntary conservation.
We will likely get to Stage 2 at some point in May, which has more mandatory conservation.
[In 2007] we were in Stage 3, which had much more severe cutbacks in water usage and more required conservation. The 2007 drought lasted over 460 days.
At Duke, we want to maintain the ability to provide good electric generation and we also have to work with our partners to make sure drinking water supplies for over two million people are not impacted.
Turner: How would homeowners and small businesses experience some of those mandatory water restrictions?
Walsh: There'd be certain times that you could irrigate your lawns and there would be requirements on only certain days of the week you'd be allowed to do that.
Also, required recreational flows from our license do get suspended during Stage 2, so people who might be wanting to recreate on our lakes would see that. But I think that they're already seeing that some boat ramps are being impacted because the lake levels have gotten low.
I was out at the Lake Wylie Buster Boyd access area and we had two of our four ramps already shut down because of the lake level there.
Turner: What are you seeing on the horizon for this drought?
Walsh: We're doing our best to guess, right, with some really smart scientists and meteorologists, but one thing I did hear is that as we get to later in May and into June, there may be some more humidity that could end up.
You know, ending up in the area with some higher humidity days, that would be a good sign because maybe that brings more thunderstorms, maybe that brings more extended showers.
It will take ‘many months of being inches ahead’
Turner: Speaking of rain, we got a little bit over the weekend, how much of a dent did this make in the drought situation?
Walsh: Unfortunately, not much. To get out of the drought, it will not just be a weekend weather event. We need some prolonged rain to really help replenish all of these basins, and there's quite a bit of storage that we are down.
So, I'm telling folks to be happy when we get rain, it's always going to be good, but if you're looking at being inches behind each month, month over month, it takes many months of being inches ahead to make up that difference.
Turner: And how can folks help?
Walsh: Conserve when you can. Starting that shower and letting it run for five minutes just to make sure it's hot enough is probably not the best thing we should do.
While it's still voluntary, if you can avoid watering your lawn two days a week and cut down to one for a short amount of time, we'd love to see people do that. We oftentimes tell people to take showers versus baths. Don't turn the faucet on while you're getting ready to shave and just let it run.
Any little thing we can do for all of our users — you know, a gallon here, a gallon there among all of our users will add up and certainly help us.
