DRYING UP.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: North Carolina is running short of water - Brief Article

North Carolina's unquenchable thirst could lead to something more than a drinking problem.

Grass crinkled underfoot, parched not from summer heat but a dry spell that dragged through autumn. As October turned into November, frost replaced the morning dew, but only scant, scattered rain fell on Greensboro. City reservoirs shrank by two-thirds. If the water level dropped a few more feet, intake pumps would suck air. Faucets and hydrants would run dry.

State and federal officials began compiling sources of bottled water. "Can you imagine how much water 225,000 people would need," says Steve Marks, Guilford County emergency-management coordinator. His recommendation: Make plans for evacuating the city. The day Craig Coleman, director of forecasting at Kaiser-Roth Corp.'s local plant, heard the rumor, the hosiery mill had to shut down early. "We didn't have water to flush the toilets." His reaction was typical. "First, there was shock at the idea that they were going to evacuate a quarter-million people, then disgust and horror. You got mad as hell."

It was a misunderstanding, officials now insist. Evacuation, Marks admits, was a poor choice of words. All he was suggesting was that people voluntarily leave town -- stay with friends or relatives, maybe go on vacation -- until the crisis passed. But the fact remains: In 1998, North Carolina's third-largest city was flirting with a proposition reminiscent of the doomsday drills of a generation earlier. This time, though, the threat was not nuclear war but lack of water.

That December, the sky opened and eight inches of rain fell. But Greensboro's predicament has become a portent for the rest of the state. North Carolina -- with 46 inches of average annual rainfall, crisscrossed by rivers, pocked by 3,820 square miles of lakes -- is running short of water. Within 20 years, many experts predict, affordable freshwater will be a barrier to economic development. It's already fueling regional feuds and pitting city dwellers against farmers. With political power pooling in cities, few doubt who will win.

Starting next August, farmers in 15 eastern counties will need permits to irrigate their fields, part of a state crackdown on overpumping aquifers, vast underground stores of water. They're being singled out, many complain, to atone for the sins of New Bern, Jacksonville and other municipalities. "There'll be areas of North Carolina that, 10 years down the road, will have very little agriculture because of competition for water with cities," predicts Larry Wooten, president of the 415,000-member North Carolina Farm Bureau Federation. At risk is a sizable share of the state's $6.7 billion-a-year farm income.

Some strains on water are natural -- drought follows predictable cycles. What worries scientists is human influence. North Carolina's impending water crisis is, in large part, man-made: The state is a victim of its own success. Explosive growth and the exploitation of what has proven to be a finite resource have led not only to shortages such as Greensboro's but have altered the very lay of the land.

Case in point: the Coastal Plain. Tractor-trailers thunder by, causing the aging concrete bridge to shudder violently. You are standing on U.S. 17 in the town of Washington, where the Tar River becomes the Pamlico. Fanning north along the Tar and its tributaries and south along the Neuse to Kinston and New Bern, the worst flooding in Tar Heel history killed 51 and did $1.3 billion damage in September 1999.

Scientists have come to blame much of the devastation that followed Hurricane Floyd on overuse of wells by cities, factories and farms that caused hundreds of square miles to sink as much as a foot. They base their conclusions on new data and long-ignored U.S. Geological Survey records dating to 1935. Much of the Coastal Plain, only a few feet above sea level, now faces a second threat. As it sinks, global warming is melting the polar caps, raising the ocean and sounds. "Our planners are already being told to anticipate tides that will increase 1.5 feet in the next 50 to 100 years," Pitt County Manager Tom Robinson says.

All along the Piedmont Crescent, from Charlotte to Raleigh, fast-growing cities duster along ridgelines. Only a few straddle rivers. Most are sustained by small streams and reservoirs, at the mercy of even minor dry spells. What they take, places downstream lose. The Carolina frontier has vanished, but a frontier attitude toward water survives in the South: It's free, plentiful and ours to waste.

"Anything free has no market value, so the market system that we think is so great is absolutely no good when it comes to life-support resources of water and air," says Eugene Odum, a University of Georgia ecology professor. "That's why water wars are coming faster than we expected. Charlotte and Raleigh are just a few years behind Atlanta."

In the best of times, mountain wells typically yield a fifth the water others do. Now Western North Carolina is locked in a three-year drought, which a generation ago would have had little effect beyond wilted gardens. Hundreds of wells are going dry, forcing mountain towns to limit development.

Why have the strains on Tar Heel water largely escaped public attention? For one thing, water seems to be everywhere. Until now, few outsiders knew of Greensboro's evacuation scare, mainly because many communities were preoccupied with their own troubles. Twenty-four Tar Heel cities and towns endured some form of water rationing or restrictions on washing cars, watering lawns and gardens and filling pools in 1998. That increased to 44 in 1999. Following Floyd's floods, the figure fell to 23 last year. Cities downplay shortages, afraid of spooking business prospects. "At the time Greensboro was having its crisis, our water was dangerously low, too, but the utility people kept it hush-hush," says Larry Shaw, a state senator from Fayetteville who pushed legislation through the General Assembly this year to study damming the Cape Fear River. "We were in serious danger that the river was going to fall below the intakes at the pumping station."

Shaw is still fuming because booming Cary two years ago started building a $60 million plant to take 8 million gallons a day from Jordan Lake, upstream from Fayetteville in the Cape Fear watershed, before getting state permission. It was a calculated gamble, Cary officials admit. The state gave the town permission to take the water in July -- a month after the plant was completed. "The most serious issue facing North Carolina in coming years is going to be drinking water," Shaw says. "We're going to need this down the road. We're ready to fight for it now."

In an otherwise dry spring, rain spatters against the window of John Morris' 11th - floor office in Raleigh. Around a conference table, the state water-resources director and three staff members rattle off one point after another -- dry mountain wells, shrinking Piedmont reservoirs, disappearing aquifers...