A teenager’s letter to the editor caught my eye the other day. Nikolai Hesterberg of Cary said a front-page story on the drought “really stunned me. I was aware of the severe drought conditions, but until I read your information, I was unaware of just how severe the situation is.” Nikolai added: “Front-page headlines really have an effect on teenagers like me.”
And on lots of the teen’s elders. The seriousness of this climate crisis seems to have caught the public’s attention almost suddenly, and people are turning to their newspaper for information on the severity, causes and culprits, the outlook for the future and what they can do.
I contacted a number of readers, and a few experts, last week to see how they thought The News & Observer was doing in meeting their information needs about the drought. A consensus was that The N&O is doing a good job — several said excellent, some said inadequate — but they want us to bring on more information.
“I don’t think there can be too much coverage,” said Karen Edwards of Raleigh. Mary Ellen Bowers of Chapel Hill said, “Coverage has been good recently, but I’d like to see more. What is the worst-case scenario? If we don’t get enough rain in the next couple of months, what will happen?”
Other questions people want answered:
* Why have state and local governments waited so late to act?
* Who are the biggest water hogs?
* What’s the breakdown among business, agricultural and homeowner water use?
* What is the doomsday scenario, if water supply craters, and who will have to suffer how much if governments ration water?
The N&O already has addressed many of these questions and has stories in the works to address others. The paper started writing about the drought March 20, and the story moved to the front page June 1, when officials declared a moderate drought. From Sept. 1 through Friday, there had been 67 stories, editorials and op-ed pieces, including 10 on the front page and a Q section devoted to “Water wars.” Stories have told you:
* History lessons from past droughts.
* The relationship of growth and water supply.
* Plans for long-range water management, including increasing supply and charging more for water.
* Inadequacy of government response.
* Impact on agriculture.
* Loopholes in water-use restrictions.
* Water conservation ideas.
In addition, The N&O has placed a lot of information online, including timeline maps of the drought’s progress, a “fact finder” of drought-related information and a drought discussion forum.
John Morris, director of the N.C. Division of Water Resources, praised the paper’s work, especially photos of dried-up lakes and graphics comparing local water supplies that he said dramatically illustrated the problem. He cautioned the paper not to paint the drought picture with too broad a brush, because some communities are suffering less than others. “In some of these communities, it’s not as crucial for them to be rigidly restricting water use,” he said.
Bill Holman, an environmental scholar at Duke University, said he thought the paper’s coverage had spurred governments to act, but not enough. State government did not learn enough from the last drought in 2002, said Holman, who is a former head of the state environmental agency. He’d like to see the paper examine drought emergency plans that local governments are required to submit to the state but that haven’t received much scrutiny. Do the water-supply numbers add up, he asked, and is there conflict between state and local plans? “I think we could benefit by more public exposure,” he said. “You write a story about that, and people will say ‘that doesn’t make sense.’ ”
Also praising the coverage was David Moreau, director of the Water Resources Research Institute of the University of North Carolina. But he said measures of drought severity in the headlines — numbers of days’ supply in the Falls Lake reservoir, for instance — are too simplistic. They don’t take into consideration historic streamflow trends that might show less risk of the supply running out.
“Some of the cities are making these calculations, but I haven’t seen any of that reported,” he said. “That’s what’s kind of missing. A hundred days of storage may actually be pretty good. I don’t know what the real risk is” without seeing an assessment that takes into account historic streamflow as well as reservoir storage and rainfall projections. “Our cities should, of course, be prepared for the worst, try to avoid it, but be prepared for it if it comes,” he said, adding, however, that “there is the problem of crying wolf when there is no wolf.”
* * *
THERE IS OTHER COVERAGE that readers said they’d like to see. There have been good mini-stories of individuals coping with the drought, but not much on the human dimensions — impact on the low-income, the elderly, the wealthy (who seem to be the most put-out).
How are water bills affected, and does reduced water usage mean reduced water revenues for municipalities? What is the effect on fish and wildlife?
And maybe we should cry a little more wolf. There hasn’t been a hard-eyed look at what happens if, as the paper has warned, Raleigh gets down to sludge at the bottom of Falls Lake by January. If consumption has to be cut, say 50 percent, how is water rationed, how is that enforced, how do business and residential customers cope? Will jobs be lost?
Richard Stradling is The N&O editor who oversees the drought coverage, and he promises that these and other stories are in the queue. (In fact, you may see the “doomsday” story on the front page today. This column is written earlier.)
The paper has a rationing challenge of its own, he says — limited reporting staff to cover an abundance of water stories and to meet the increased reader demand that is primed in part by the paper’s ramped-up coverage. “We’re in a position where all of a sudden everybody wants a lot of stories,” he said. “We’re going to be doing this for months, and we’ll get to them.”
