Further to Dennis Cook’s Aug. 21 letter: His solution to an ongoing drought that looks to continue is to drain another water source?
This seems rather shortsighted.
He writes that “the long-range weather forecast says warm winter and another hot summer.”
If that’s the case, what is needed is a long-term revisiting of the water situation.
To drain a source that won’t be replenished because of a change in precipitation is short-sighted.
We have water. We can drink, and clean ourselves and our clothes.
The fact that people cannot “wash the outside of their homes, their cars, their driveways” is not terribly dire.
Problematic would be a mirror of the California situation, where some communities are running out of water. Not water to waste on clean pavement, but water, period. The grass is brown and the shrubs are dying.
The solution would seem to be to start to shift how we landscape. Lots of bark mulch, plants that don’t require a lot of water, domestic cisterns to store the water that does fall for later use, and the purchase of a good quality broom would be an excellent start.
If this is the new reality, a significantly drier climate, it makes no sense to drain the water available to us for such ridiculous uses.
Michelle Pahl