Today on CityCast DC, you might not know it, but DC is in the middle of a drought, but
we've also had flooding in the city, so how can both things be true?
And should we be conserving water?
Jacob Fedgston explains what you need to know about DC's drought conditions.
Today's Monday, September 11th, I'm Bridget Todd and here's what DC is talking about.
So Jacob, I didn't actually know this, but DC isn't a bit of a drought right now.
How do we get here?
Yeah, I mean, you might not notice like it's just kind of always green here in the summer
right.
Like it doesn't look like a drought necessarily, but it started pretty early in the spring,
which is typically, you know, pretty rainy time of year here.
It was very dry, if you were called May, like it didn't rain at all.
That was the third driest May on record, I believe, the driest since 1999, I think.
And then we got some rain in July, but it's sort of been off and on these longish dry
spells.
And that has added up to about five inches behind normal in terms of rainfall for the year.
And the Potomac River, if you've like been out degrade falls recently, you'll notice
the water levels are quite low right now.
Okay, so forgive me if this is kind of a stupid question, but there's also been massive
flash floods in DC.
So how can both of these things be true at once?
How could we be experiencing flash floods, but also be in a drought?
Right.
Yeah.
So unfortunately, a lot of the rain that we have gotten has come in these big kind of one
time events, and that water washes down the drains into the Potomac River and out of
the Chesapeake Bay into the ocean.
So it doesn't necessarily really help with the drought if it all comes like in a few
hours and then it's dry for another long, long period.
So we have both experienced some extreme rain events flooding, a lot of that has been
in the news, but at the same time, we've been experiencing these longer periods of dry
weather.
Is this unusual for the area like hasn't happened before?
Yes, and yes.
I mean, it is unusual and it has happened before.
So I've been here for about a little bit over a decade.
I've been covering the environment for more than five years here, and I've never really
thought about drought here.
I grew up in California.
So this was like something I'm used to thinking about all the time, but haven't really thought
about here.
This is the first time I've really covered it very much as a reporter.
There were various, various droughts in the 1930s, 1960s, and then again, right around
the turn of the century, 1990, 90,000.
Those experiences actually did lead to some planning and some infrastructure creation
that has put us in a better place today than we were, say, in the 1960s.
But it is something that can happen here, and it's also something that I think we can expect
to happen more with climate change.
We can talk more about that, but I think a lot of times we think about climate change
in this region.
It's going to be wetter.
There's going to be more rain.
There's going to be more flooding.
There's going to be sea level rise.
But there's also going to be an increased risk of drought, kind of like with the wildfires
this year, you know, that's not a climate impact we think about in this part of the world.
But obviously, we can also feel those effects.
That's so interesting.
Are there other types of impacts of climate change that we might not be thinking of or
might not be high on our radar in this area that actually might be part of our reality
going forward?
I mean, I think wildfires, smoke from wildfires and drought are three that sort of came
on to my radar, especially this summer.
The smoke this summer, obviously, was mostly coming from Canada.
But we can also have wildfires in the eastern U.S., you know, Quebec usually doesn't catch
on fire in the summer, but it did this year in the same token, you know, the eastern
U.S. used to have wildfires that used to be part of the landscape.
And we eradicated that through how we've developed and managed for us.
But we could still have wildfires and obviously droughts and wildfires go hand in hand.
Yeah.
It's comforting to know that we eradicated them in this area at one time, but I would
not put it past us to bring them back.
Yeah.
Native Americans used fire to sort of shape the landscape pre-European arrival.
And fire was part of the landscape for a long time.
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So I know that DC typically gets water to folks via the Potomac River.
How exactly does that work?
There's something called the Washington Aqueduct, which sucks in a bunch of water at
great falls.
And it uses gravity to send it downhill to the District of Columbia.
And I think Arlington is also part of it.
It comes into our pipes that way.
There's been some thought recently that we need to have kind of a backup place to
get water also because if something were to happen to that system or somehow the Potomac
were contaminated, there is no other way to get water into the pipes in DC besides the
Potomac River.
So yeah, the Potomac is where our water comes from.
So then what's the plan to get water to residents if this drought does continue?
The sort of backup plan currently is upstream reservoirs.
So three of them in the Potomac watershed where they can release water from the reservoir
and it will travel downstream and basically refill the river when the water levels get low.
The biggest one is up in West Virginia, sort of on the border with Maryland in the Maryland
Panhandle.
It's called Randolph Jennings and it is about 900 acres and they, you know, frequently
they release water for whitewater rafting.
So it's like a recreation thing and you can go up there and wait for the water to come
pouring out of the dam and have fun.
But they also can release water to deal with the low flow levels on the Potomac.
Oh, that's interesting.
So in order to get more water upstream, DC would then have to coordinate with Maryland
or Virginia to get more water?
Yes.
So there's actually a entity called the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin.
They are one of the groups that is, you know, closely monitoring the drought conditions
here and they basically, you know, do the math, look at how much water is being withdrawn,
how much water is flowing in the river and if needed, they tell the reservoirs, we need
more water.
Part of that equation is that there needs to be 100 million gallons of water flowing
in the river each day just to sort of maintain the aquatic ecosystem.
So if it gets close to that level, if we would be withdrawing enough water that it would
get close to that level, then that's when they would need to release more water from upstream.
So being from California, I imagine that you're really familiar with water conservation
efforts, you know, don't water your lawn at certain amount or different kinds of policies
to get folks to conserve water.
Do you see that happening in DC?
Yeah, it certainly could happen.
I mean, the sort of longer term forecasts, this fall suggests that, and also kind of
history suggests that in the fall, droughts tend to clear up and we are expecting more
rain this month.
So hopefully it'll get better soon, but the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments
is the entity that sort of keeps an eye on this and they could declare a drought watch,
which would be the next step in terms of water conservation.
And in that stage, they would basically be asking people to conserve water voluntarily,
so that would be things like, yeah, not watering in the middle of the day, not washing your
car at home, that sort of thing.
And there are further steps down the road if the situation does not improve the involuntary
water conservation, but we're still a ways away from that kind of thing.
I would note that there are some places in the region west of here in Virginia that
are in a little bit more of a severe drought situation, places like Front Royal, which
relies on the Shenandoah River.
They do already have mandatory water conservation measures in place.
So for example, you are not allowed to water during the day, you're not allowed to wash
your car, and if you break the rules, they will find you a thousand dollars.
So that's sort of where DC could be headed, but we're not there yet.
So what's on tap for the future of water conservation and drought management in DC?
Yeah, I mean, I think the sort of ongoing conversation moving forward is kind of like
about that secondary source of water.
And there is a bill in Congress that I would do two things, one of which I'm very excited
about, which is that it would fund a study of where the best swimming beaches could be
on in the district of Columbia as the rivers get cleaner.
So I'm very excited about that.
I hope it gets funding.
And the other thing is that it would study the possibility of a secondary source of drinking
water for the district of Columbia.
And maybe that's a little bit more important than the swimming beaches, but I don't know.
So I think that is sort of an ongoing conversation.
There's some studies that have been done in terms of like building a new reservoir in
an old quarry north of here that would actually instead, you know, just putting water in
the Potomac, it could directly supply water to DC as a sort of a second source besides
the river.
This is still something that people are thinking about and trying to make the region more resilient.
Jacob, thank you so much for being here.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Before you go, here's some quick news.
Starting today, Metro is running more frequently during peak commute times.
Red line trains will be running every five minutes, green and yellow lines every six
minutes, and blue and silver line trains every ten minutes.
Happy one day.
Meanwhile, many DC classrooms were without AC during last week's record breaking September
heatwave.
Currently, there are more than 80 high priority work orders from all functioning HVAC systems
across DC public schools.
The city says crews are working as fast as they can, and they've already completed more
than 1,700 work orders related to school's temperature systems this year.
And finally, continuing the city government exodus, three notable officials are leaving
Mayor Muriel Bowser's administration.
The director of the district department of transportation, the head of the mayor's office
on veteran affairs, and the director of the department of small and local business development
will all be leaving their roles in the coming weeks.
These departures add to the abnormal amount of turnover that has occurred since Bowser
inaugurated her third term.
That's all for today here on CityCast DC.
If you enjoyed the show, share it with your friend who's so sick of this hot weather.
Hold back tomorrow morning with even more news around the city.
Talk to you then.