March 18, 2002
 
 
 MOUNT SAVAGE - Volunteer firefighters from all around this Allegany County mountain town returned last weekend to a chore they have repeated every Saturday since late October.
 
 All Saturday morning, they filled their tanker trucks with water from hydrants in nearby Corriganville and, one after the other, made the five-mile uphill drive back to Mount Savage.
 
 There, on a hillside above the town, they pumped their loads through 500 feet of fire hose, across a cow pasture into a 115,000-gallon cistern. The concrete tank provides water to 34 homes, two businesses and a church with a day care center.
 
 Months before the rest of Maryland became aware of what is becoming the most serious drought in the region since the 1930s, the wells and springs that feed the Bald Knob section of Mount Savage's water system dried up.
 
 The town is one of at least a dozen Maryland communities living under the kinds of mandatory curbs on water consumption that Gov. Parris N. Glendening is preparing to impose on most of Central Maryland, as early as today.
 
 "Welcome to my nightmare," said Nancy Hausrath.
 
 She is an environmental technician with the city of Cumberland. It is Cumberland's water that Mount Savage is taking from the hydrants in Corriganville. But Hausrath has bigger worries.
 
 Cumberland's reservoirs in Pennsylvania are drying up, and its 50,000 water consumers have been living with curbs for more than a month. That's helping, Hausrath said. But even with the present restrictions, if it doesn't start raining long and hard, Cumberland will run out of water by mid- to late June.
 
 The state was at least dampened by rain yesterday - nearly two-tenths of an inch in the Baltimore area about a quarter of an inch in parts of Western Maryland - and light rain was expected to continue through Wednesday.
 
 "It's certainly not a drought buster, but it certainly helps," said Jim Wiesmueller, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Sterling, Va. "At least it's providing some surface moisture. That's a big help for the farmers."
 
 With reservoirs falling, wells and springs failing in many communities, and rainfall since September more than a foot below normal, Glendening has said he intends to declare a drought emergency. He will extend mandatory restrictions on water use to Baltimore, Carroll, Cecil, Frederick, Harford and Howard counties, and parts of Montgomery and northern Anne Arundel counties. The rest of the state is under either a drought watch or warning, with voluntary curbs on water use. Baltimore City, though not required to curb water use, plans to go along.
 
 Cumberland, while outside the governor's drought emergency zone, is the largest Maryland community forced by shortages to impose water restrictions.
 
 Hausrath stood Friday afternoon on the cracked, dusty slope of what was once the bottom of Lake Koon in Bedford County, Pa., just north of Cumberland. The lake - a record 29 feet below capacity - feeds into Lake Gordon, which is the primary source of water for Cumberland and nearby communities in Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
 
 "We have three weeks of attainable water in Koon," she said. There's enough in Lake Gordon for 90 more days.
 
 Just up the lake, and 25 feet below the bottom of a boat ramp, Robert Nelson, 65, fished Friday for bluegills, as he has done since the 1940s.
 
 He had two fish in his bucket, but the condition of the reservoir worried him. "Man, it's bad," he said. "I've never seen it like this before." The well in his nearby cabin is drying up.
 
 Cumberland's water customers were asked in early December to make voluntary cuts in water use. The restrictions became mandatory Feb. 15, after Pennsylvania declared a drought emergency in Bedford County.
 
 Hausrath gave the city's 18 biggest water customers 30 days to submit a plan for cutting consumption by 10 percent or face unspecified penalties from the city. One hundred smaller commercial users will soon receive similar letters.
 
 At Memorial and Sacred Heart hospitals in Cumberland, that means finding ways to save 17,000 gallons a day.
 
 Kevin Turley, vice president for systems facilities at the Western Maryland Health System, the hospitals' parent company, said they will return to using more disposable bed pads, isolation gowns and dishware to cut back on washing.
 
 "We went to reusables to save money four years ago," Turley said. "It will cost us more, but it's pretty easy to do without an adverse impact on patient care."
 
 Showers for staff are out, except in emergencies. And the routine topping-off of patients' water pitchers is finished.
 
 South of the city, the 1,714 inmates at the state's Western Correctional Institution are doing their part, too.
 
 Like the hospitals, the prison must cut its water consumption by 10 percent, or about 20,000 gallons a day.
 
 Since March 7, inmates who once could shower as needed have been cut back to one six-minute shower every other day, unless their jobs - in food service or the prison hospital - make hygiene more critical.
 
 Security Chief Louise Gordon said inmates will also have to make do with washing their clothes once a week instead of twice.
 
 Although there are skeptics, Gordon said, "most of the inmates understand, especially if you tell them it's a statewide problem."
 
 Most Cumberland residents seem to understand, too. City employee Joe McCrobie, 19, said he and his wife, Mary, 18, are taking shorter showers and trying to save water in other ways. "I heard we've only got 90 days of water left, and that's not that long when you think about it."
 
 In Carroll County last week, Hampstead and New Windsor joined Westminster, Mount Airy, Manchester and Taneytown in forcing water restrictions.
 
 The curbs imposed last fall in Westminster as well as a new tap on a local creek have helped the city boost its reservoir from 30 percent of capacity to 57 percent - still about 30 percent less than last spring, said planning and public works Director Thomas B. Beyard.
 
 Taneytown officials added businesses to their water curbs. And in Mount Airy, where water restrictions have been in place since summer, Mayor Gerald R. Johnson said, "I have a feeling we're going to maintain them even if we get tremendous rain."
 
 Thurmont, in Frederick County, imposed mandatory cuts in water consumption Feb. 15 when water in the town's well system fell below the lows set during the 1999 drought.
 
 Water in those wells is 15 to 40 feet below normal for this time of year. In two of them, the water has nearly dropped to the pumps.
 
 "I could lose one of them any time now," said Thurmont's water superintendent, Gary Dingle.
 
 On March 8, town officials closed Thurmont's two commercial car washes, limited operating days and hours at the coin-operated laundry, and stopped issuing building permits.
 
 If things don't improve, Dingle said, Thurmont is considering rationing water - limiting the town's 5,500 residential users to 50 gallons a day per person and cutting commercial users back by 25 percent.
 
 Dennis Shafer, who runs the Suds Shop, said closing the laundry four days a week has cut revenues by 25 percent to 30 percent.
 
 He worries about losing customers, but he's philosophical about the bind he's in. "It's a lot better than being closed completely," he said. "You can't always think of yourself, too."
 
 Small public water systems in places such as Windsor Knolls and Point of Rocks in Frederick County have been failing this winter because of the drought, combined with inadequate design and growing demand.
 
 Tuddie Keyser Garver, owner and manager of Keyser-Garver Well Drilling Inc. in Frederick, said private wells - mainly older, shallower ones - are failing, too.
 
 "We're doing at least twice what we were doing last year as far as replacement wells," he said.
 
 As they scramble for short-term solutions to this unusual winter drought, water managers have also been forced to consider the unthinkable - what they'll do if the abundant spring rains they're counting on don't materialize before the weather turns hot.
 
 Hausrath said Cumberland is preparing to ask Pennsylvania for permission to shut off the spillage of 1.1 million gallons per day from the city's dam, required by law to sustain the trout downstream in Evitts Creek.
 
 Every week that water runs through the dam, Hausraf said, it costs Cumberland residents a day's water supply.
 
 The city is also working on contingency plans to bring in mobile equipment to tap into the Potomac River or to run an emergency water line to the lake at Rocky Gap State Park.
 
 Thurmont is investigating the possibility of tapping a 250-gallon- per-minute town well abandoned in 1980 because of gasoline contamination.
 
 Meanwhile, in Mount Savage, the Saturday ritual of hauling 50,000 to 70,000 gallons of water from Corriganville in firetrucks continues.
 
 Jim Rice, 40, treasurer of the town's three-man Mount Savage Water Co., says keeping water flowing to its Bald Knob service line has cost the company half its cash reserves - more than $17,000. The money was spent to refuel the volunteers' tanker trucks after 762 round trips, repair their busted pumps and feed them pizza. But every other solution has so far come to nothing.
 
 A proposed water line from Cumberland or Frostburg is years away. Of the two new wells the company drilled last summer, one dried up and the other collapsed. An artesian well above the town is producing plenty of water, but it may be contaminated and is so full of iron it's orange.
 
 Danny Williams, the water company president, said he plans to meet this week with state and county officials to brainstorm.
 
 In the meantime, he said, "a lot of the people on that system are taking their laundry out of town."
 
 Sun staff writers Maria Blackburn and Johnathon E. Briggs contributed to this article.
 
 
 
 
 
 Copyright (c) 2002, The Baltimore Sun
 
 Link to the article: http://www.sunspot.net/bal-te.md.drought18mar18.story
 
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