While much of MetroWest and the rest of America counted down toward the coming of the New Year and the dropping of that legendary ball in Times Square - "Nine, eight, seven, six!" - a different kind of countdown is taking place in the cities, towns and villages of the Southeast.
I'm referring to the number of days remaining in the water supplies of such splendid "New South" cities as Raleigh and Durham, NC, Columbia, SC, Atlanta, GA, Montgomery and Birmingham, AL, Knoxville, TN - and the list, of course, goes on.
Pick your turf down there, chances are the folks in that jurisdiction are struggling desperately in the midst of a historic drought. In Raleigh, the proud capital city of North Carolina, they talk about a drought so devastating that its equal has not been seen for more than 150 years. And of the 100 counties in North Carolina, the U.S. Drought Monitor lists 78 Tar Heel counties as suffering from "Exceptional Drought," the very worst category. The state's remaining 22 counties are about evenly divided between "Extreme Drought" and "Severe Drought."
(Let's just pass over for the moment any semantic arguments on these U.S. Government drought categories, in which "severe" somehow becomes the least serious. It is sufficient to note that most of the Old North State is covered by the most serious category, "exceptional.")
On our most recent visit to Raleigh, N.C., wherein reside our daughter, son-in-law and their two rambunctious toddlers, we made a point of going out to Falls Lake, the principal source of potable water for homes in the Raleigh area, now the undisputed "Ground Zero" for North Carolina's continuing drought. Islands of mud are now popping up through the surface of this fragile lake. We have also enjoyed on this trip our usual two-mile walks around the perimeter of similarly afflicted Shelley Lake.
Come to think of it, both these lakes and their shorelines were still, to outward appearances, healthy when we last visited here in July. We did not realize then that the balance had long since begun tipping towards drought. And that's just the point.
Nobody, least of all the meteorologists - can say with any degree of confidence when this particular drought began. It's not a discrete event like, say, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which began the great war in the Pacific in 1941. That attack took place on Sunday morning, at around 8 a.m., on December 7, 1941. The awesome conflict it initiated closed out on the deck of the battleship USN Missouri on August 14, 1945 with the signing of an unconditional surrender by the Japanese.
Drought is far more subtle, far more insidious than that. It is a process which extends over months and years as the Earth finally heals its wounds deep in the ground where underground aquifers, streams and even rivers gently flow. To use a modern term, those underground conduits are the "infrastructure" that Mother Nature provides to make sure that most landscapes get the water they need.
As is always the case, nature's own "infrastructure" for distribution of water is a remarkable wonder to behold. But what happens to that particular "infrastructure" when a fast-growing population begins to exert its pressures, when developers start exchanging forests for gated communities, when ordinary folks suddenly become "consumers" and demand the so-called "good life" they can see in all directions?
What happens is that various natural and man-made infrastructures over the course of two or three generations become stressed, until the tipping point is reached. Can anyone doubt that Americans have long since gotten past President Teddy Roosevelt's injunction that we must all be "stewards" of the environment? Responsible stewardship is what we owe to our neighbors and to our children.
Can anyone doubt that the Chinese, still growing explosively, are also heading towards a tipping point that will rival any of ours? Their tipping point will most likely be a pollution crisis that will astonish us all, at least as much as their spectacular economic growth in recent decades.
Yes, yes, North and South Carolina both got some nice, solid rain last week, for which folks are properly and understandably grateful. More rain is expected this New Year's weekend. All well and good, and all thanks go to the Republican governor of Georgia, Sonny Purdue, who recently summoned his people to public prayer, so that their pleas for rain might be heard, shall we say, at the highest level.
But does this mean the drought is finally over? No, not at all. Because that underground "infrastructure" for water distribution has been seriously damaged in many American jurisdictions. Now, the term of art is that nature's underground infrastructure needs to be "recharged," like the kegs at a Frat House beer party.
The recent rain in the Raleigh area extended that city's threatened water supply from 91 to 95 days. When the days dwindle down, the estimates on the number of remaining days are always hedged with the stipulation that such estimates assume the same rate of water consumption and conservation efforts going forward. Any change in consumption and/or conservation patterns will be reflected sooner, rather than later in the governmental estimates.
Meanwhile, over in neighboring Durham, the situation is even more critical. Reported the Raleigh, NC News & Observer on Dec. 28: "Durham this week has 36 days of water left in its main supply, down from the 39 days it had as of Dec. 16. Losing just three days in a 10-day span - a slower than normal decline - is a small victory."
And the Raleigh City Council is expected next week to approve "Stage 2" water conservation rules, which are already being widely criticized as inadequate for the accelerating crisis. Asked about the nature of Stage 3 restrictions, a Raleigh city official acknowledged that he really couldn't say what the Stage 3 rules might be like, "because we've never been there before."
So here we sit in front of the big flat-screen TV waiting for the ball to drop. "Five, four, three, two, one, HAPPY NEW YEAR!"
Peter Young is a resident of Marlborough.
