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In a drought, but not a panic

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Staff
PHOTO BY KIRK ROSS. The mud flats of University Lake near the causeway on Jones Ferry Road.

By Kirk Ross
Staff Writer

Driving across the short causeway on Jones Ferry Road that spans University Lake near Morgan Creek, you can easily read the decline of the waterline along the banks and view the muck rising above it.

The lake is down roughly four feet from full. Likewise at Cane Creek. The official water supply level for the Orange Water and Sewer Authority stood at 70.1 percent as of Wednesday morning.

Ed Holland, OWASA’s planning engineer, said that although the lake looks low, the supply is nowhere near as low as it takes to trigger further conservation measures.

“It really depends on the time of year,” Holland said. Right now, he said, the supply would have to drop to 35 percent to trigger tighter restrictions on water use. “If this were June, we’d have to be above 70 percent.”

Orange County is part of a wide swath of North Carolina extending from Charlotte to the Virginia border that is in a severe drought, according to the state’s drought-monitoring program.

OWASA’s official rainfall totals for the past 12 months show just 35.48 inches of rain compared to the yearly average of 45.82.

Holland said the utility is watchful but not worried, mainly due to the conservation methods that have been put into place since the 2007-08 drought. Customers upgrading to more-efficient fixtures and responding to a tiered rate structure and the university’s efforts to use more recycled water have had a major impact in use, while a decline in new housing units has slowed growth in demand, he said.

But with the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center calling for drier than normal weather for the next three months, the mudflats off Jones Ferry Road are likely to stick around for a while.

“You have to remember that University Lake holds a lot less water that Cane Creek,” Holland said. “That’s a shallow part of the lake, so that’s where you see it.”

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