Swaths of the Northeast are facing drought conditions, putting significant strain on some communities.
While the summer began with plenty of precipitation, parts of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York are now experiencing abnormally dry weather to severe drought.
“Since about late June parts of the area are well below precipitation. We’ve had parts of the area, especially the upper Hudson Valley portion of New York, as much as 6-8 inches below normal of precipitation. Again, that greater anomaly is in the upper Hudson Valley, it’s a little bit to the South and West, but still we’re a few inches below normal from where we should be for the period of roughly late June through the current,” said Kevin Lipton.
Kevin Lipton is a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Albany. He says the Capital Region isn’t forecasted to receive any rain for at least another week.
“September can be really dry. If we don’t have tropical systems to, you know, or the remnants of tropical systems, sometimes we just get into this lull with the weather pattern where it just gets really dry. So, we’re in that right now, it just lasted a bit longer than normal and it started back in late July and August, the dryness, and it really got kind of worse now. We’ve got to just wait for these more widespread rain events to start up which usually start up in October,” said Lipton.
This month, reports from the Lake Champlain Basin Program showed the New York shores of the lake were near record lows.
According to the National Integrated Drought Information System, this past August was the 4th-driest on record in Washington County, with more than 97% of people in the county being affected by the ongoing drought.
One community at particular risk is Whitehall. The village entered a state of emergency and enacted a boil-water notice in December when it was discovered the water level of the local reservoir was a dozen feet below normal.
Democratic Mayor Phil Smith, who was elected in March, says reservoir conditions have been slowly improving since the winter, but the current drought is posing its own challenges.
“You know we’re using water on a daily basis and it’s depleting but we’re in pretty decent shape. We had the rains in March, April, May, that time frame so we’ve been four or five months now doing pretty well and we’ve used up maybe a third of that water that filled the reservoir because we haven’t had any more rain to keep it topped off,” said Smith.
Village officials have asked the roughly 1,200 residents to preserve water, though Smith says no conservation mandate is needed yet.
“So, I would say we’re in good shape for at least several more months if this drought continues. But we’re like everyone else, we’re going to need some rain here sometime soon,” said Smith.
Smith tells WAMC the village has so far received more than $3 million in federal, state, and county grants to fund much needed water infrastructure upgrades.
In Saratoga County, Pitney Meadows Community Farm’s Assistant Farm Manager Kelly Holzworth says they’re taking the dryer conditions in stride.
“We’ve got a lot of our onions and potatoes and things really don’t want a lot of rain this time of year so we’re trying to look at the bright side and appreciating a lot of our crops that do want it dryer right now,” said Holzworth.
Holzworth adds that in her fives years at the farm, she’s never had trouble with well water, but the farm is prepared in case drought conditions worsen.
“If anything it’s made it easier. It allows a lot more flexibility in our schedule. Typically this time of year we’d be working around rainy days and scrambling to harvest things in time before we get a rain event but this year it’s felt a little more relaxed because we haven’t had predictive rainfall to schedule around,” said Holzworth.
