Water strategy should be as right as rain

Face it; you take water for granted.

Every now and then you might get a reminder about how precious it is. It turns brown out of the tap. Or your municipality puts restrictions on use due to drought conditions.

But the murkiness has always cleared. The reservoirs filled again. You might even have dismissed warnings about watering the lawn or washing the car. After all, isn’t rain as reliable as death, taxes and Tom Brady?

A world without rain may seem like a plot in a bad dystopian movie (we’ve had enough of those), but every now and then it’s nice to have a reminder about the true value of the elements (for now, we’ll ignore water’s big sister, air).

The conditions in some parts of the state in late 2016 should have gotten the message across. The Stamford reservoir was at 40 percent that Thanksgiving.

Aquarion Water Co. had to install a temporary 18-inch pipe to ship water from the Bridgeport area. It wasn’t just a few swimming pools of water racing cars along the pipe that ran parallel to the Merritt Parkway. The pipe funneled 4 million gallons of treated water a day, more than a third of the amount used daily in Stamford.

That black pipe should have sent a message. So should drought news from South Africa, where Cape Town is counting down to April 12, aka “Day Zero” when taps are scheduled to be turned off to provide water safety.

The glass is more than half full in Connecticut these days. Thanks to some hefty rainfall, as well as recent snow, our reservoirs are now rated as being at 103 percent of capacity.

But different problems, with their own cautionary warnings, now loom.

Bloomfield opened its water supply to Niagara Bottling a couple of years ago, raising concerns that the deal was approved without appropriate oversight or public input. The company diverts a million gallons of drinking water a day.

It’s hard to blame companies such as Niagara from coming to Connecticut. Isn’t that what we all want these days, new business? Connecticut, after all, is lauded as most consistently maintaining the highest-quality drinking water.

A new report from the state Water Planning Council that weighs in at more than 600 pages is to be presented to a quartet of legislative committee when a new General Assembly session begins next week.

Reaction to that report makes it clear that Connecticut has never focused enough energies on appropriate management of its liquid assets.

Lori Mathieu, the public health section chief for the state Department of Public Health, said Connecticut officials have expressed a need for a “plan for water since the 1950s.”

We needed a plan even earlier than that, but 60 years is enough time to figure out that bad things happen when reservoirs run dry.

State officials have had enough time to get their feet wet on this issue.tate officials have had enough time to get their feet wet on this issue.

Sixty years is enough time to figure out that bad things happen when reservoirs run dry.