Illiberally sprinkled
Last week marked the official beginning of hurricane season, and as if on cue, within the day, two tropical storms had made landfall — one on the Pacific coast of Mexico, while the other, Barry, landed at Tampa Bay, crossed the Florida peninsula and headed back out into the Atlantic for a weekend tour of the Carolina coastal plain.
The rains brought by Barry, close to three inches in some parts of the Piedmont, were welcome and lushed up some flagging green spaces for a while.
Nice as it was to get some precipitation, even a heavy rain like that didn’t slow down the march of drought across the state.
In our westernmost mountains, the situation is already critical, with the worry over widespread forest fires growing.
For ourselves and the growing municipalities around us, the worry is about the water supply, low flows in the creeks, a drop in the water table and rapidly draining reservoirs. Officially, for now we’re in a moderate drought.
Drought well indicators in Orange County show levels below the mean. And lake levels at University Lake and Cane Creek Reservoir are starting to drop.
Unlike Raleigh, Cary and Chatham County, we are not yet at the trigger point for mandatory conservation — due, perhaps, to a combination of good planning, ongoing conservation and luck. But we are not far from a clampdown on water usage either, and it’s time to start thinking now about preparing for it. If you don’t have a rain barrel (or a 30-gallon garbage can and a siphon), you should. And if you’re on the verge of rolling out new sod, planting water-necessitating shrubs or just bound and determined to save your lawn from the dreaded color of brown, we’d like you to reconsider — or, rather, to consider the folly of such action.
We know from recent public discussions on the Orange Water and Sewer Authority’s proposed rate increase and future plans for keeping up with demand, that there are far too many homes where the lust for a lawn has left the concept of sustainability in the dust. There are individual homes where the sprinklers run up the water use past the 20,000-gallon-a-month range. (According to OWASA, a typical household uses somewhere around 3,000 a month.)
Most of us have stories about seeing sprinkler systems running in the rain or so poorly maintained and aimed that they might as well be a straight pipe into the storm drain.
It has always been an interesting fact that water consumption shoots up when the bulk of the student population leaves for the summer. Although some of that is due to growth and an increasing year-round population, the main explanation is the desire for a nice, green lawn.
To some, it is a property right to lawn up as one sees fit. But each summer, millions of gallons of OWASA water go into maintaining such splendor, much of it sending pesticides, herbicides, phosphates and nitrates down the gutter and into our streams. The impact on water quality for all of us and on water quality downstream has been all but maddening for anyone who has to deal with mitigating damage to either.
There are alternatives and, as columnist Ken Moore points out on page 8, one of the best is abandoning the single-species water-reliant lawn in favor of xeriscaping with drought-resistant native plants.