Connecticut Water asking consumers to conserve

High temps, dry weather spurs call

As Connecticut sweated its way through a sixth straight day with temperatures of 90 degrees or above, officials with one of the state’s largest public water utilities said Tuesday it was asking customers to make voluntary reductions in usage.

Clinton-based Connecticut Water Co. is asking its residential customers to not water their lawns until further notice, while businesses, municipalities and schools are being asked to avoid irrigating their grounds and ballfields. The utility also is requesting that fire departments eschew using water in their training exercises. Connecticut Water has nearly 90,000 customers in 56 towns in the state, including Beacon Falls, Bethany, Clinton, Deep River, Essex, Guilford, Killingworth, Madison, Old Saybrook and Westbrook in the New Haven area.

Dan Meaney, a spokesman for the utility, said that according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, conditions across Connecticut range from abnormally dry to moderate drought. But given the extended dry weather conditions and no indication that these weather patterns will change, Connecticut Water officials felt it was important to ask customers to begin voluntary conservation measures.

The utility’s vice president in charge of service delivery, Craig Patla, said overall, Connecticut Water’s supplies are in good shape.

“(But) we face unique challenges with many smaller systems that rely on small local wells and in the Shoreline area where there is a seasonal influx of customers to local beach communities,” Patla said.

Connecticut Water’s request for voluntary conservation comes a little more than a week after the state’s other large water utility, Bridgeport-based Aquarion, made a similar request of its customers. Peter Fazekas, public relations director for Aquarion, said the lack of rain, combined with increased water usage because of the heat, necessitated the conservation request by the company.

“Our average daily delivery to our water customers is 90 million gallons,” Fazekas said. “Yesterday we delivered 127 million gallons to customers.”

Aquarion serves 51 communities and more than 625,000 customers throughout the state, including Derby, Shelton, Seymour and Stratford.

Weather conditions and increased use of water has prompted the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority to undertake what spokeswoman Ada Cortes calls “a rebalancing” of the water resources in the utility’s network of 10 reservoirs and three aquifers.

Normally, Cortes said, the Lake Whitney Treatment plant in Hamden does not run on a regular basis. But she said the plant is now running around the clock “to restore a balance among our water sources.”

The Regional Water Authority serves 430,000 people in 15 New Haven-area towns and the lower Naugatuck Valley.

Fazekas said if hot weather and a lack of rain continues, the next step would be for Aquarion to consider mandatory conservation measures.

Connecticut Water’s Meaney said that if “conditions continued to deteriorate to more critical levels (with the company’s wells and reservoirs), we would initiate progressively more stringent drought watches and warnings depending on the conditions of each individual water system.”

But declaring mandatory water restriction is something that is difficult to enforce, industry sources and public officials said, speaking on the condition that they remain anonymous.