Shortage forces many to reuse water creatively

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Carol Noonan of Brownfield knew the drought was bad when she ran out of water in midshower and had to rinse her soapy hair with the only water around: in her dog’s drinking bucket.

That’s not the half of it.

After their 15-foot-deep well ran dry, Noonan and her husband let their dirty dishes pile up and started using paper plates. They stopped using their clothes washer and dishwasher. They began recycling water, for instance, by putting water from their pasta pot into the toilet tank.

They are among thousands of Mainers whose wells have run dry or slowed to a trickle because of a severe drought that has gripped the state since last August. It’s so bad the Federal Emergency Man-

agement Agency is considering making Maine the first state ever to receive disaster funds for a drought.

Having occasionally gone days without showers or fresh clothes, Noonan has learned a new appreciation of water. She’s also learned humility.

“You lose a lot of shame,” Noonan said.

All across Maine, a state with thousands of lakes and rivers and an ocean full of water lapping at the coast, residents accustomed to plentiful water have been reeling from the worst drought in 107 years of record-keeping.

Nationwide, droughts now cover about a third of the country, cutting huge swaths from Maine to Georgia in the East, and from Montana to Texas in the West.

The dryness is comparable to the droughts of 1988-89, 1963-64 and 1953-57, but far less severe than the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, said Rich Tinker of the national Climate Prediction Center in Maryland.

In Maine, where almost half the 1.2 million residents get their household water from wells, more than a thousand people have reported that their wells have gone dry or low. Schools, mobile homes, nursing homes, and entire municipalities are running low or out of water. Rivers are low and farmers are worried. The Maine Forest Service is bracing for more forest fires than usual.

And some fear the worst is yet to come.

Recent rains and snow have provided a respite for some, including Noonan and her husband, Jeffrey Flagg, who now have a small amount of water in their well. But forecasters warn that precipitation must run well above normal for several months to bring the state out of the drought.

The state Drought Task Force already warned Mainers that wells may not get recharged as they’re supposed to in the spring, a time of melting snow and rain showers that usually turns the state into a muddy mess. The U.S. Geological Survey says its monitoring wells are running low.

If groundwater levels don’t rise in the next few weeks, they are unlikely to rise significantly in the months ahead without torrential rains, the kind that typically come in late summer, not late spring.

“We’re a hearty breed,” said Bert Ingraham, director of the Penobscot County Emergency Management Agency. “But it will be difficult washing cars, watering lawns and growing gardens this summer.”

Maine is an unlikely place to have water problems.

After all, the state gets more than 40 inches of rain a year; there are 7,000 rivers and 5 million acres of wetlands; and Maine’s 5,785 lakes and ponds cover an area larger than Rhode Island.

Getting that water to the tap isn’t as easy as it sounds in a place where little more than half of residents have access to something people in other states take for granted: public water systems.

About 280,000 Maine households, or roughly 45 percent of the state, get water from wells. Of those, about 53,000 are shallow-water wells that are only 10 to 20 feet deep and most susceptible to drying up.

Peter Mead of Brownfield, who uses one of those shallow wells, thought his pump had gone bad when his tap ran dry in January. Wells run dry in the summer, he thought, not in the heart of winter.

Now he gets his water at the town office, where he fills a pickup truck load of containers and transfers it to three plastic garbage cans in his front hallway. This is the household water for cooking, cleaning and the toilets.

Mead’s shower looks like a scene from “Gunsmoke” – he stands in a washtub-like receptacle and pours water heated on his wood stove over his head. The three children who still live at home shower at friends’ houses.

Mead worries that the town water will make his wife and children sick – especially since the water sometimes comes up a mud brown.

“This is my water system right now,” Mead, 50, said sadly as he looked at the garbage cans in his front hall. “You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.”

Droughts are slow to take hold, and they can be slow to lose their grip.

Although a wetter weather pattern has emerged in recent weeks, the National Weather Service says the drought is so severe that it will take months of normal to above-normal precipitation to end it.

If that’s the case, it could be a bleak tourist season ahead for marinas whose docks are now sitting on muddy lake bottoms, and for other water-dependent businesses.

The weather service officially is predicting a “slow improvement” through June. But nobody knows for sure what will happen as the warmer months arrive when water demand is greatest.

“I haven’t seen many hopeful words out of the mouths of the weather service offices we deal with,” said Lynette Miller, senior planner with the Maine Emergency Management Agency.

Here in Brownfield, a town of 1,251 on the New Hampshire border, there are a number of signs that the months ahead could be tough ones.

For starters, people are used to having standing water in their basements because of spring showers and melting snow.

Vicki Coffee, who works at the post office, said her basement is dry. So are the woods across from her house, which are normally a knee-deep quagmire come spring. The Saco River, which cuts through town, is lower and flatter than usual.

For now, people aren’t sure what to do – except cross their fingers.

Noonan and her husband recently bought two 100-gallon water tanks to keep in reserve, and are optimistic about having water in the months ahead. Of course, they felt the same way last summer when they first ran out.

“We didn’t want to accept it,” Noonan said. “We just kept thinking it would rain – and it didn’t.”

Mead hasn’t a clue what he might do.

Even if the federal government issues low-interest loans to dig new wells, he doesn’t know how he would afford it; he’s recovering from back surgery and isn’t working these days.

“Four or five thousand dollars? I don’t have it,” he said. “I don’t think many people do.”