Seattle Times All Wet On Drought

It's hot today and it's going to continue through the weekend, but think twice about cranking open a fire hydrant NYC style. Despite assurances from the Seattle Times, all is not well with our region's water supply after the extremely dry winter. Typically we count on mountain snow to melt throughout the summer and provide our rivers and streams with a constant supply of fresh water. This year what snow there was is already gone.

The Seattle Times says:

A few days of rain weren't going to reverse months of dry weather that had left mountains bare of snow, Nickels cautioned.

But the rain kept falling.

Now, major Western Washington water suppliers are sounding increasingly confident that they have dodged the drought bullet.

The bullets are still in the air, however. A much more responsible accounting of the same information coming out of Seattle Public Utilities can be found in this week's Seattle Weekly. There Kirsten DeLara begins by explaining how a drought is a very slow moving bullet:

"Droughts unfold slowly, affecting different things at different times—it's almost a slow-moving natural disaster," says Curt Hart, a spokesperson for the state Department of Ecology's water- resource program. "Right now, drought conditions are most severe in the Yakima Valley and all over Eastern Washington." Meanwhile, in the Puget Sound area, the Department of Ecology is seeing some rivers dropping to record low levels.

We'd like the related SW article on how the drought is affecting the region's fish to be a lot longer, but it does give some indication that even though your kitchen sink probably won't dry out this summer, our water situation is still dire.