By Brittany Woodby

BWOODBY@CULLMANTIMES.COM

City and county officials met with engineers Wednesday to learn more about the current drought situation and to begin preparations for short-term emergency action.

Steve Newton, engineer with CH2M Hill, presented an analysis of the present drought situation. The city hired CH2M Hill in September to assess alternative water sources.

“We’ve been under a D-4 drought, along with about 39 percent of the state,” Newton said. “This time last year, 0 percent of the state was under a D-4 drought. We’ve come from that situation to where we are now, and that’s the reason we’ve got to seriously look at conservation and look in other places for how can we get some additional supply.”

Newton said one of the most important issues in Cullman County now is conservation, which will extend the supply of water available in the city’s reservoir, Lake Catoma, for longer.

“If we were getting 16 million gallons a day out of the lake, we would have 105 days left. If we could use only eight or 10 million gallons of water a day, it would extend the water supply by several days,” he said. “Cullman has instituted the Phase 3 drought conservation measures, and what this does for us is encourages customers to use water wisely, and be a good steward of the environment and of water all the time. But what it really does for us is it extends the number of days we have.”

Since the city instituted Phase 3 of the drought emergency plan, Newton said customers have reduced water usage by 15 percent in December 2007 from what they used in December 2006, conserving almost 50 million gallons of water.

“That’s significant, but we need to continue being vigilant about that because this drought may go on,” he said. According to the National Weather Service’s drought outlook assessment, Cullman County will remain in the part of the state expected to endure drought conditions through March.

“We need a lot of rain and we need repeated rain,” Newton said. “But there’s the potential we’ll be seeing drier-than-normal seasons in the next few months, and if that’s the case, this certainly means we’ll need to continue our conservation efforts.”

Newton said Cullman is currently developing a drought plan to determine how the city will meet the reasonable drinking water needs of the community if the drought continues.

“What the plan does consider are the feasible things we can do, as well as the cost-effective things we can do,” he said. “There are going to be a number of triggers in this plan, meaning when the pool of Lake Catoma reaches a certain elevation, we need to do something. ... That’s really what the plan is about.”

Newton said even if the area experiences heavy rainfall which restores Lake Catoma to full pool, the city needs to have a plan in place to prepare for future water shortages due to drought or due to increased demand.

CH2M Hill consultant Tom Harwell presented some long-range plans the firm has looked at on behalf of the city utilities board to meet the area’s future water needs. He said engineers reviewed the city’s plans to build a dam on Duck River as well as options including drawing water from Smith Lake and piping water from the Tennessee River.

“We started looking at options from an outside point of view, being sort of a third-party to look at everything across the board and get everything up-to-date and see what’s the most up-to-date information available,” he said. “One of the things we saw is that none of the options are really litigation-proof.”

Presently, the city has a Section 404 permit to begin construction of a dam on the Duck River, which would create a 640-acre reservoir to draw an additional 32 million gallons of water a day for Cullman water customers. Though environmental groups have filed a lawsuit against the project in federal court, Harwell said there is no injunction to prevent construction on the project from beginning today and it still remains the only long-term project to be fully planned and permitted.

“We really believe Duck River is the best option for Cullman,” he said.

Of the three major projects Harwell compared, he said Duck River was the best because it allowed the Cullman Utilities Board to be the sole governing entity over the reservoir. Smith Lake is owned and governed by Alabama Power and the Tennessee River is governed by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

He also said Duck River would only require a six-mile, 48-inch pipeline from the reservoir to the water treatment plant instead of a 30-mile pipeline to the Tennessee River or a 15 to 19-mile pipeline to Smith Lake.

Harwell urged officials to begin construction on the project as its permit is only good for 10 years. The total construction costs for the plan, if work began this year, are estimated at $59.5 million. Engineers predict the cost would translate to roughly a 53-83 percent increase in water rates for customers.

Newton said he and engineers will hold a meeting with representatives from Cullman’s wholesale water customers next week to further discuss the details of the water source alternatives.