Warm weather trend causes drought, boon to businesses with outdoor dining
By: Cheyanne Garza
Tags: Drought, Weather, Community

Warm weather trend causes drought, boon to businesses with outdoor dining

Written by CHEYANNE GARZA Nov. 16, 2020

2020 has been abnormally dry for the North Country, an increasingly common trend in recent years which is affecting people on community wells and those with their own water sources.

This year has been so dry that the North Country was largely classified as being in a drought by May, according to Kris Hudson, the weekend weathercaster at WWNY-7 News. By the end of July, “almost all St. Lawrence and Jefferson Counties were under a severe drought,” he added.

According to Hudson, Watertown typically receives over 25 inches of rain by the end of September during a typical year. This year, however, the city recorded just under 21 inches in the same time period. The abnormally dry year was punctuated with a wet October that dropped nearly five inches of rain on the city, more than one inch over the average for the month during a typical year.

The cause of the drought can be traced to the temperate winter the area had, during which time the North Country received below-average snowfall. Temperatures also remained high enough to melt what snow did fall before springtime, when the snowmelt flows into waterways across the area and supplements wells throughout the summer months.

Like Watertown, Copenhagen had an extremely dry year this year that mirrored a similarly dry year in 2016. During that time, Village Superintendent Doran Johnson said that the village had so little water in its wells that it had to be trucked in to supply the residents. It was, he said, “the result of a two-summer drought with very little precipitation.” The village trucked water in until mid-October, when he said a spate of heavy rainfall over the course of several days refilled the village wells to sustainable levels.

This year, the village’s source of water became dangerously low again because of the lack of snow over the winter and low rates of rain during the spring and led it to declare a state of emergency in September. That declaration led to the rapid renovation and reopening of the village’s old water plant on Woodbattle Road to supplement the water supply from the new plant on Stoddard Road.

The reason the old water plant was reopened so quickly, Johnson said, was because the village had reached a point where, “probably within three days, we wouldn’t have had any water for 956 users.”

The Woodbattle Road plant is located on top of a prehistoric lake, according to tests run by a hydrogeologist several years ago, but no one knows how long that source of water will last. Johnson says that the water source is supplementing the new Stoddard Road plant very well right now, but it could “last another 20 years, or it might last another 20 weeks.”

Johnson blames Copenhagen’s water emergency this summer on the absolute lack of significant rainfall, saying, “the whole thing basically results just from the fact that last winter there was really very little snow, this summer there was virtually no rain and wells depend a source of water, and there just wasn’t any.”

Johnson remains cautious about the village’s water supply because, although the village received over four inches of rain in October, the wells at the Stoddard plant “are normally well over 100 feet in depth of reserve water and right now we’re around 45 feet. We were down at one time to seven or eight feet. They are rebounding, but slowly compared to 2016 when it took three days of rain and they came back immediately.” He added, “this has been the first real issue that we’ve had that’s downright scary with water.”

Although this summer has been abnormally hot and dry, some places have been able to use the record-breaking heat to their advantage. According to Beth Hall, the weekday weathercaster for WWNY-7 News, the hot temperatures and sunny days proved advantageous for “boaters, pool owners and outdoor eating,” particularly so during a year when people have been discouraged to eat out.

The pandemic, although damaging to many businesses, has allowed for innovation in the dining industry, particularly those places which have access to outdoor eating areas. If the trend of hot, dry summers continues into future years, Hall believes some restaurants will take advantage of the new fixtures and dining areas they have implemented to increase the number of diners that can be served at one time. “It’s tough up here to rely on outdoor eating because of the short warm season,” she said, adding, “If they invested in the outdoor heaters and decks it can work.”