While many states up and down the East Coast have declared drought emergencies and mandated reduced water usage, officials in Maine have shied away from calling for conservation measures even though experts say the upcoming summer is shaping up to be drier than last summer.

In New Jersey, restaurants are banned from serving water to customers unless they ask for it, and state residents must use brooms, not water from hoses, to clean paved surfaces such as driveways and sidewalks. In some parts of the state, watering lawns is prohibited altogether, while watering is permitted on alternate days in other areas. Golf courses have been ordered to reduce their water use by 50 percent.

In Virginia, the governor ordered state agencies to develop water conservation policies and to immediately begin following them. Residents were asked to cut down on the use of unneeded water by not washing their cars and taking shorter showers.

New York City declared a drought emergency this week and imposed restrictions that carry penalties of up to $1,000. The restrictions include no private washing of vehicles, no washing of sidewalks or streets, and restricted hours for watering lawns.

Earlier this month, officials in neighboring New Hampshire declared a drought emergency, thereby allowing communities to enforce water conservation measures such as curbs on watering lawns and filling swimming pools.

Here in Maine, the conservation message has been muted at best.

In December, Gov. King made a speech urging Mainers to turn off the water while they brush their teeth, to not do partial loads of laundry or dishes, and to get low-flow toilets and shower heads.

In the month since then, when the outlook has worsened due to a lack of snow and rain, there has been little talk of conservation. Instead, the Maine Emergency Management Agency, the department charged with heading up the state’s drought preparation and response, has focused its attention on helping people drill new wells.

Private problem?

Calling for water conservation doesn’t make a lot of sense in a rural state like Maine, said Art Cleaves, the MEMA director. Like many Maine residents, Cleaves who lives in Wayne, gets his water from a private well. If he decided to conserve water, however, it likely would have little impact on the amount of water in the wells of his neighbors, two of whom have run out of water.

“Universal conservation doesn’t help out,” he said. Instead, Cleaves has offered showers and water to his neighbors.

Gov. King’s spokesman, Tony Sprague, agreed. People who rely on well water need to be cautious because their supply could run out at any time. Those whose wells have run dry or are known to be short on water are probably already conserving. For others, conservation won’t do much good because water supplies are very local, he said.

However, Sprague pointed out that a long list of water saving tips is available on MEMA’s Web page.

Nearly half of Maine residents get their water from private wells. It is these people by and large who have run out of water or watched their supplies dwindle to low levels during the past 15 months of drought in Maine.

As the level of water in many lakes and reservoirs continues to decline, however, many public utilities are casting a wary eye on water usage. Two systems, Castine and Alfred, have instituted mandatory conservation measures.

Castine, which relies on wells for its water supply, has banned watering of lawns and gardens, filling of swimming pools and the washing of cars and boats. Fines of $100 can be levied, although none has been since the regulations went into effect last August.

The town’s single largest water user – Maine Maritime Academy – has instituted a number of water- saving measures over the past several years, said the school’s facilities director Stacey Bowden. The school no longer waters its grass athletic fields and gardens. Vehicles are no longer washed on campus, and some laundry is sent out to be cleaned rather than doing it on campus. The school has replaced shower heads in its gyms and dormitories with ones that use less water, and when toilets are replace, water-saving models are purchased. While the town’s overall summer usage of water has increased, the academy’s summer consumption has declined since 1997.

Seven public water systems, ranging from Island Falls to Boothbay Harbor, are calling for voluntary conservation.

One such system is the Monson Utilities District, which provides water to a small community south of Greenville.

Last fall, when one of three pumps that bring water into the town’s reservoir briefly ran dry, the utilities district put up posters in public places urging residents to conserve water. People were asked not to wash their cars and not to water their lawns and gardens.

Although most of the posters are probably gone, the district is still encouraging residents to conserve, said Jeanne Reed, Monson’s town manager. The message will probably get louder as the weather warms up and people begin to use more water, she said.

“We’re concerned for the upcoming summer,” Reed said.

Conservation measures are something that water utilities should be working on, said Jeff McNelly, executive director of the Maine Water Utilities Association. And they should be thinking of real water savings, “not just screwing in water-saving shower heads,” he said.

His association, which represents 125 municipal water systems from Van Buren to Kittery, is working with the facilities to ensure they leak as little water as possible. Some older systems are losing up to 40 percent of the water they take in because of leaky valves and meters. Such losses should be in the range of 10 percent to 15 percent, McNelly said.

The Maine Rural Water Association, which has 319 members serving nearly 372,000 people, also offers a leak detection program. To date, 300 utilities have had the free tests, said Steven Levy, the group’s executive director. It hopes soon to offer the service to schools and mobile home parks so they too can save water by reducing leaks.

Likely to get worse

The folks in Monson and elsewhere have good reason to be concerned. State weather experts warn that the upcoming summer could be much worse than last summer. That’s because this winter was also extremely dry and warm. Not much snow fell, and what did was not water laden. To make matters worse, most of the snow melted early when the ground was still frozen and simply flowed into streams and rivers rather than seeping into the ground to re-charge underground water supplies.

Since the start of the year, Maine needed 11/2 times the normal precipitation to end the drought by June, according to State Climatologist Greg Zielinski. So far this year, precipitation levels have been “barely normal,” he said.

That means the upcoming summer “could be really bad,” Zielinski said.

But while utility managers are keeping a close eye on water levels and weather conditions, many Mainers aren’t convinced there’s a drought because they see water all around them. The sense of doom was further eased earlier this week when rain and wet, heavy snow fell on the state, although experts said the storm will do little to ease drought conditions.

Maine’s current abundance of surface water is deceiving, said Bob Lent, the Maine district chief of the U.S. Geological Survey. Because of its geological history, Maine has small, poor-quality aquifers to hold water underground, out of sight. This is the water that is relied upon by households with wells and others who pump water out of the ground. These are also the water sources that have been depleted by many months of dry weather.

In the Midwest, a single aquifer may lie under several states, providing water to all of them. For example, water from a well in Kansas may have flowed from a source more than 100 miles away, Lent said. In Maine, an aquifer may only extend 100 feet from a well, drastically limiting the area the well can draw water from.

To make matters worse, when streams do not have much water flowing in them, as many do now due to the lack of rain and snowmelt runoff, they draw water from underground aquifers, Lent said. This further depletes the amount of water stored under the ground.

Different mindset

Because the states on the East Coast tend to be wet compared to their western counterparts, residents and government officials in this part of the country tend to be less conscious of water use, said Harry Lins, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Water Resources Division in Virginia.

In perennially dry states such as California and Colorado, for example, restrictions on water use have become a way of life. Not so in the East, where the average rainfall is about four times that of the arid West and Southwest.

Maine was the only state in the nation last year to set a new low precipitation record. Still, more than 29.5 inches of rain and snow fell in the state, compared to just 9.5 inches in Wyoming, which experienced “much below average” precipitation but did not set a record, according to data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. In 2001, only 7.4 inches of precipitation fell in Nevada, which was “below normal.”

People who live in the “water poor” regions of the West live with “a certain sensitivity to water,” said Lins. Huge reservoirs covering thousands of acres have been built to store water for prolonged dry periods that are certain to come. Nevada’s Lake Mead, which was created by Hoover Dam in 1935, is 580 feet deep and covers 247 square miles. It holds enough water to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania to a depth of one foot. Pipelines and tunnels also transport water over great distances to farmers and growing cities in the West.

No such infrastructure exists in the East, where water is more plentiful. Eastern states also tend not to have drought management plans, which are commonplace in most western states.

“People in the East tend to be slow in response. Then, they’re frenetic about it,” Lins said.

Droughts don’t just crop up, he said, but they are years in the making. The current eastern drought began in 1998 and likely won’t let up soon. Lins, too, warns that this winter’s dry conditions is likely to make the summer of 2002 worse than last year’s.

“It’s a sleeper event coming in the winter when things typically get better,” he said.

“We depend on winter to bail us out. It’s like a bank account – you rely on deposits to get you through. This winter there were no deposits,” Lins said.