Drought lessens; water companies still vigilant

This winter’s precipitation has had some impact in refilling the Connecticut’s reservoirs, but not enough to allow the state’s water utilities to let down their guard.

Representatives of the three major water companies serving the New Haven area said last week that it will take more extended periods of precipitation before they can say things are back to normal.

“We didn’t get to this point overnight and we’re not going to get out of it overnight either,” said Kate Powell, a spokeswoman for the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority, which is based in New Haven and serves residents and businesses from 20 New Haven area towns. The quasi-public utility is still asking customers to voluntarily reduce the amount of water they use when ever possible, a request it first made last July.

Dan Meaney, a spokesman for the Clinton-based Connecticut Water Co., said even with the amount of precipitation that we had this winter, the utility’s reservoir’s are just 83 percent full. Based on historical data, Meaney said the reservoirs are normally 90 percent full at this time in the winter.

“We’re thankful that we’re starting to see some regular precipitation, but our reservoirs are refilling more slowly than in the past,” he said. “And it’s important to remember that we started from a lower base than in the past.”

Wallingford’s Department of Public Utilities announced on Dec. 5 that it had declared a Water Supply alert. The DPU ended that alert last week.

“We’re in better shape than we were two months ago,” Robert Beaumont, chairman of the town’s Public Utilities Commission said after the alert was lifted.

The declaration was the first and least serious in a multistep protocol associated with assessing the community’s present and future water needs. The alert precedes a four-stage process that is set into motion when the town’s average reservoir storage is less than 80 percent of the historical average for a minimum of 60 calendar days, according to Beaumont.

“Quite candidly, within a couple days of the alert being declared, we moved back above the 80 percent mark,” he said. “But to avoid the confusion of having to lift the alert and then possibly having to put it back into place a short time later, we waited until the full 60 days was up.”

An alert can also be triggered when the three-month rainfall average drops below the historical average by a certain amount, Beaumont said.

“If we’d had to go to the next level of the process, it would be a lot more serious situation,” he said.

The Water Division takes readings at its reservoirs at lest once a week, Beaumont said.

Water Division officials are still encouraging customers to voluntarily conserve water whenever possible and limit unnecessary water use in order to help ensure an adequate supply to meet essential needs.

Officials with Aquarion Water Co. were not available for comment last week regarding whether the Bridgeport-based utility will continue with the request it made to some of its Fairfield County customers last August to conserve water. Aquarion serves 51 communities and more than 625,000 customers throughout the state, including Derby, Shelton, Seymour and Stratford.

About 28.4 percent of Connecticut currently remains in an extreme draught condition, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. That represents a decline of about 14 percent from the last week of December until now,

The bulk of extreme drought conditions at this point remains in northwest Connecticut, including most of Lichfield County and the western half of Hartford County.

The U.S. Drought Monitor was established in 1999 and is a weekly map of drought conditions around the country. It is produced jointly by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln