News & Views You Can Use
Saving Water
Restaurants Pitch In
originally published October 3, 2007
Five months. Three. One and a half. It’s the grim countdown across the Southeast, as local municipalities - Athens included - tick off the remaining days until their reservoirs go dry. The region’s water shortage demands immediate, progressive action from all sectors of the community. Here in Athens, David Cappi, owner of DePalma’s, is calling on his peers in the restaurant business to cut down on water usage in their industry.
It started with an email a few weeks ago, which Cappi addressed to management at Bischero, East/ West Bistro, Five and Ten, Harry Bissett’s and Farm 255. Cappi says, “I explained the dire situation that we all faced over the next six weeks and the even more painful situation that awaited us if rain had not replenished some of our reservoir. I told them about our restriction of pouring water and suggested that there had to be many other ways for us all to pitch in and save, and that if there was any idea that one of us wanted to share to feel free to pass it on through the email list and myself.”
Besides only pouring water to customers on request, Cappi is making a host of other changes at his downtown restaurant. Most of the adjustments are hardly radical, but they do prove the simple merits of economy. For example, he just had a hot water heater installed underneath the bar sink. Before, the only water heater was at the back of the building, so far away that his employees were just wasting water when they had to run the tap waiting for it to get warm.
“For several hundred dollars (including labor), we should be able to save 20 or so gallons a day from that measure,” Cappi says. “Again, not huge, but it is a savings that over the 19 years we’ve been open could have saved hundreds of thousands of gallons for one sink in one business.”
In the meantime, Cappi is considering a multitude of other recommendations and sharing the best ones, like rationing ice cubes, with other restaurants. “One of my managers suggested that we buy an inexpensive water product, say Dasani, and sell it at cost so that we aren’t making any profit, but the water is not coming out of the reservoir. It is under consideration and we will probably try it within the week,” Cappi adds.
The biggest usage problem for restaurants is cleaning and dishwashing. “We currently have newer industrial dishwashing machines that were designed to use less water than the old ones,” Cappi says, but he is even contemplating going back to “washing dishes the way we used to, at least on non-weekend nights.” This would mean filling up “three sinks with water, and wash and rinse them by hand. It’s slower but it may well use less water.”
His point is unmistakable: every drop counts and every suggestion on how to conserve water is invaluable. Now is the critical time for the creative problem-solvers of the Athens community to come together.
“My hope is that people use the quick and easy technology of the Internet to do what it was supposed to do, and that is to disseminate information to help make a change. A change at this level is really late in the game, but to ignore a dilemma of this magnitude at any point is a sin.”
The Drought
What’s Our Next Move?
originally published October 3, 2007
Steve Dorsch, Athens-Clarke County
The sad scene at the Bear Creek Reservoir, as of late September.
If the current intense drought continues long enough, Athens-Clarke’s water-saving restrictions will have to move to a final, emergency level, allocating water to specific categories of commercial and industrial users based on how the water is used. Food preparation, for example, might receive a higher priority than other uses, according to Athens-Clarke County (ACC) Manager Alan Reddish. No decisions have yet been reached about how much reduction will be required of various categories of users, although Reddish speculates that at least some reduction might be required from all. “We have never had one of these plans before,” he says - because there hasn’t been a drought severe enough to need one. Also undecided: whether homeowners would also be asked to reduce their usage beyond the current outdoor watering ban.
Reddish hopes that the current watering ban - intended to reduce water usage by 20 percent - will stretch out existing supplies until rain comes. There is no date certain when water will run out, he says, because “it takes a while for everybody to get the word” about the ban, and demand may still be dropping. Outdoor watering is also banned in Barrow, Oconee and Jackson counties, co-partners in the Bear Creek Reservoir. Athens’ total outdoor watering ban - in place since Sept. 17 - may have bought the county an extra 12 days of reservoir water, Reddish thinks. At current usage rates, reservoir water should last into November. (After that, water could still be pumped from the depleted reservoir, but the remaining water would not be as suitable for treatment. Its taste and color might be affected, ACC Public Utilities Director Gary Duck has said.)
At press time, ACC officials were optimistic that the Georgia Environmental Protection Division would soon be granting Athens a waiver to withdraw up to 15 million gallons per day from the Middle Oconee River for 45 days. Along with county-wide reductions in use, officials hope the additional river water will get us to the end of the calendar year - but they stress that it is not a reason to lighten up on conservation practices. “Having this ability to pump an additional 15 million gallons [per day] by no means suggests that we need to reduce any water restrictions,” Reddish says.
At some point, and based on specific technical “triggers” that include soil moisture and reservoir level, ACC Commissioners may be asked to approve an emergency water-rationing plan: the last, most drastic step of the county’s six-step drought management plan. (The first five steps simply required more and more limited hours for outdoor watering, along with a requirement that car washes, plant nurseries and construction sites reduce their water use by 20 percent.) Details of a last-step rationing plan are being discussed by Reddish’s office, the Public Utilities Department, and Jordan, Jones and Goulding, a public-utilities consulting firm, Reddish says. “It would allocate water to the highest-priority uses first, and then, through some sort of hierarchy, allocate less water to other lesser-priority uses,” possibly even cutting some to zero, he says. But nobody in government likes speculating about what the rules would be.
“We don’t want to say what that is right now,” says Mayor Heidi Davison, “so that we don’t begin to send out false messages to people until it’s perfectly clear what the plan is going to be.” Reddish said a plan will be ready if and when it’s needed. “We will have one available if conditions indicate we need to have one - right now, we’re not suggesting we need one,” he says. “Sometime around the middle of December, we usually will begin to pick up a significant amount of rain. So that’s where we’re trying to get to.”
Georgia’s current drought may be the driest on record in the short term, says UGA engineering professor (and state climatologist) David Stooksbury. But defining droughts can be a complicated task, and one in the mid-1920s was worse in terms of duration and impact, he says. “Droughts don’t develop over a week or two… It’s a cumulative effect,“ Stooksbury points out. Rainfall and temperature records have been kept in Georgia since the late 1800s, and stream flow records for the past 70 or 80 years, he says. Recently, local stream flows have been setting daily records compared to the same dates in earlier years. Jordan, Jones and Goulding engineer Bill Martello says that both branches of the Oconee River hit severely low flows in August of 2002, one of the worst drought years (until now) in recent memory. But that year, he says, rainfall from tropical storms in September replenished the water table. September 2007 rainfall was negligible.
Over the long run, Stooksbury says, “there really is no trend one way or the other” in terms of local stream flows or rainfall; there’s possibly a slight cooling trend in temperature, he says, despite a global trend towards warming temperatures.
Fake Taxi Threat
Two Abductions This Fall
originally published October 3, 2007
Athens-Clarke County (ACC) Police are hoping that nighttime visitors to downtown Athens will be especially careful how they get home after two young women have reported being abducted by a man posing as a taxi or courtesy van driver. In both cases, over the weekend of Sept. 8–9 and most likely involving the same suspect, the women got into a passenger van downtown which they thought was a taxi. In each case, after other passengers had been dropped off and each woman was the lone passenger, the driver took her to Oglethorpe County rather than to her destination. One woman was sexually assaulted and then dropped off in Clarke County; the other woman escaped from the van and called police.
According to ACC Police Captain Clarence Holeman, the women described the suspect as a white male in his 20s with brown hair and a medium build, 5’8“ to 5’9” tall and weighing 160–170 pounds. The van is described as a late-model white passenger van with a gray interior and rows of seats, probably seating seven to 15 passengers, Holeman says.
Capt. Holeman points out that all taxis in Athens-Clarke - and there is only a handful of companies - must be registered with the Police Department. This means it’s required that they have information displayed on the van’s exterior, including a company name and phone number, company permit number, and lighted sign on the roof. Unmarked vans are not legitimate taxis. Anyone who may have information about the suspect is encouraged to contact Athens-Clarke Police Detective Ben Dickerson at 706-613-3888, ext. 793. Anonymous calls can be made to the Crime Stoppers tip line at 706-613-3342.If you are having problems with the site, or have questions or suggestions, please contact us here. Thanks!
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