News-Graphic News

Rainfall catching up with drought

By JEFF KERR
Georgetown News-Graphic
12/13/07

It may seem like it's been raining forever, looking at the past few days, but Scott County is still behind in annual rainfall, thanks to this past summer's drought.

"In the last three months we've really caught up," said Jim Long, Georgetown Municipal Water and Sewer Service water treatment supervisor. "But it would have to rain an awful lot to break even for the year, and it's not going to happen."

GMWSS posts an updated rainfall figure on its Web site, www.gmwss.com, and Thursday morning, after 0.32 inches of rain fell Wednesday, it showed 3.07 inches of rain has fallen since the first of December at the GMWSS water plant, and the total for the year is 3.97 inches short of normal.

But those figures are misleading, Long said.

"Our plant is not in our watershed," Long said. "It's a 25-mile square watershed from here to Fayette County."

The Web site also shows the figures for the Royal Spring watershed, and they tell a little different story. For the month of December so far, 2.73 inches of rain has fallen in the watershed, but the year-to-date total is 9.25 inches below normal, more than twice the total of the water plant figure.

"A lot of people don't understand that it could rain 100 inches at the plant and it wouldn't help us a bit," Long said. "And the exact opposite is true. It could rain 100 inches out there (in the watershed) and we would have plenty of water, even if the grass down here at the water plant is brown."

Royal Spring is pouring out the water now, Long said.

"The spring is great," he said. "The flow is over 30 million gallons a day."

That's a far cry from the 2 million gallons a day the spring generated at the height of the drought, he said.

"During the severest part of the drought we were purchasing half our water," Long said. "Now we're just purchasing 10 percent. And that's contractual. We buy it whether we need it or not."