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Hotel Booking A regional drought that is the worst on record is taking a heavy toll in the Carolinas, where some of the country's fastest-growing cities and suburbs are proving unexpectedly vulnerable to water shortages.

About three hours later, Reames will return and reverse the process, cutting off water to the town's 145 residents. The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, The water has run out.

Travel Agency Over the last four years, North and South Carolina have come up short by the equivalent of a year's supply of rain, and now cities like Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C., as well as dozens of smaller towns, are paying the price in the form of mandatory restrictions intended to reduce water use by as much as 20 percent.

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Cheap Hotel The water shortages, so severe that one parched North Carolina town has had to borrow water by fire hose, have been driven most directly by abnormalities in the climate, among the most severe in a drought that is now affecting more than a third of the United States, water experts and city planners say.

"The drought is most severe in Kent and Sussex. "If it stays dry over the rest of the winter, east this summer." Measures could include hosepipe and sprinkler bans, more drought permits and drought orders to help water companies manage supplies. Barry Clarke of Water UK, the industry body that represents the country's various water firms, urged consumers to be prudent with their water use.

Flight Booking But those abnormalities have been compounded by sprawling growth, which has sent water use spiraling ahead even of population increases and has cut into supplies of water that would have otherwise recharged aquifers, rivers and streams.

For easy care cutting gardens, the first rule of thumb is to choose plants that are undemanding with regard to watering, fertilizing and general care. For example, choose ones that you know to be drought tolerant. A number of annuals that are commonly grown as cut flowers fall into this category. Unfortunately, most roses are too demanding to describe as easy care. However, the drought tolerant varieties require less attention than others.

Travel Agent In Charlotte, for example, the number of water users served by the local utility has increased 36 percent since 1992. But average daily water use has increased 56 percent, shrinking the cushion that planners had expected might prevent water rationing in rain-scarce years.

I want to commend the writer of "Water still needs to be conserved" (Your Views, March 28) for his forward thinking. Drought Emergency Panel, I monitored water supply issues and the state's efforts at preventing future drought emergencies. Although it is true groundwater and reservoir levels are higher due to heavy snowfall and rains over the winter, term conservation of water is still necessary to ensure we don't strain our water reserves yet again.

Hotel Chicago Now, with accumulated rainfall since 1998 running more than 40 inches below normal, water managers in the region say the lesson of the drought is that more must be done sooner to promote conservation, even in normally rain-kissed climates like that of North Carolina, which averages 40 inches a year.

Online Booking "As we grow, we need to manage our water supplies more carefully," said John N. Morris, director of North Carolina's division of water resources.

Travel Health Insurance In a study released today, three national environmental organizations called attention to the connection between suburban development and water shortages. It said new roads, parking lots and other paved surfaces surrounding cities like Charlotte and Atlanta might be preventing millions of gallons of water a day from seeping naturally into municipal water supplies that were already facing higher demand as a result of rapid growth.

Hotel Reservation "An essential and costly resource is being squandered at an alarming rate," said the study, by the Natural Resources Defense Council, American Rivers and Smart Growth America.

London Hotel Booking In the Atlanta area alone, it estimated, the daily runoff from paved surfaces built in the last 15 years may waste water that could otherwise sustain 3.5 million people.

Discount Travel The report offered only rough, unsubstantiated estimates, and independent water experts cautioned that hydrology made it difficult to gauge the exact effect of development on natural water flows. But they said rapid growth was making more and more American communities prone to drought disruptions.

Orlando Hotel "Because of development, we're much more vulnerable than we've ever been," said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb. "And in part that's because you have more and more water going into sewer drains and less into the soil."

Booking Agency While rain was falling in the Southeast today for the second day in a row, only the most immediate drought concerns have been eased. In North Carolina and southern Virginia, forecasts call for extreme drought to persist into the foreseeable future, and Duke Power, which operates the reservoirs that serve Charlotte and its neighbors, has warned that power plants and industries could be forced to shut down if water levels in reservoirs along the Catawba River continue to fall.

International Travel Medical The United States has been reducing its per capita consumption of water since 1980, thanks mostly to conservation by agriculture and industry. But among municipal water systems, overall water use increased 24 percent from 1980 to 1995, according to the most current government statistics, and in most cities it appears to be increasing faster than population growth.

New York Hotel By any standard, the lack of rain is extreme, with more than a third of the country, including much of the West, listed by federal agencies as facing severe or extreme drought.

Online Travel Booking Parts of 18 states have been declared federal disaster areas, and the drought mitigation center, an arm of the Agriculture Department, has said the dryness nationwide now ranks third, to the Dust Bowl years of the 1930's and to the early 1950's, in its severity.

Travel Medical Insurance But while other areas, including western Nebraska and the Four Corners region of the Southwest, have also been particularly hard hit, climatologists like Mr. Svoboda say the impact may be greatest in the Carolinas, in part because the two states have had no relief from a drought that began in the summer of 1998.

Miami Hotel The past 12 months were the driest August through July in 123 years of recordkeeping in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. Across most of the Carolinas, streams and rivers are flowing at 5 percent to 15 percent of normal.

Air Deccan Booking While lake and aquifer levels are near record lows, the pressure on those water supplies, in cities large and small, has been compounded by increasing summer demand, which experts say has been driven mostly by outdoor water use, as residents try to maintain green lawns around large suburban homes.

Las Vegas Nevada Travel In Raleigh, for example, water use in June set a daily record of 72 million gallons even after the local utility called for voluntary conservation, including not watering outdoors during daylight hours, and warned that the single reservoir on which the city depends was falling to unacceptably low levels.

Las Vegas Nv Hotel In response, Raleigh made restrictions mandatory, with a $500 penalty for violators. Most other communities in North and South Carolina, including Charlotte, have followed suit, in part because of a call by Gov. Michael F. Easley of North Carolina, for a 20 percent reduction in water use to stave off more serious problems.

Hotel Florence Booking Online But so far, most towns have resisted anything more than bans on daytime watering, and few have achieved more than modest reductions in water use.

Orlando Travel In Raleigh, the reservoir level is 44 percent of normal, with enough water to last only 112 days. There and in Charlotte, city officials are considering further cutbacks, which could include limits on the water available to some businesses and industries.

Hilton Hotel Until the drought, only Atlanta, among large cities in the Southeast, had been seen as facing a significant danger of water shortages.

Booking Delta Com But with the extreme dry conditions now spreading into Virginia and Maryland, cities as far north as Baltimore are facing emergency water-use restrictions. Officials in Frederick, Md., where water supply has failed to keep pace with rapid population growth, say that without significant rainfall in the coming weeks, they may have to truck water into the city around the clock to provide for residents' basic needs.

Travel Insurance Online As measured by their footprints, Charlotte and Raleigh are among the country's fastest-growing communities, having added 74 percent and 95 percent, respectively, to their land areas from 1982 to 1997, a geographic sprawl more than double the rate of their rapid population growth.

London Hotel In both cities, officials said today that abundant rivers and rainfall should be more than enough to meet growing demand well into the future. If it were not for the drought, they said, the cities would not be facing water problems.

Online Hotel Booking "There's ample room for demand to increase in the foreseeable future, except in exceptional drought years," said Vic Simpson, a spokesman for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities, which serves Charlotte.

Travel Insurance They acknowledged, however, that they had been caught by surprise by the degree to which the demand for water has surged in recent years, and they said the drought and shortages were being seen as a warning to do more to bring water use in check.

Paris Hotel "People are using more water than they used to, and it's something we need to keep a handle on," said Marti Gibson, environmental coordinator for the public utilities department in Raleigh.

Airline Booking By Douglas Jehl
New York Times - 8/29/2002

Topic: Water

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