CONCORD — If drought conditions hold to current forecasts and persist through early next year, Kannapolis will be dangerously close to losing access to one of its water supplies.
Lake Don T. Howell, formerly called Coddle Creek Reservoir, was more than 812 feet below full this week. That’s nearly 4 feet below normal for this time of year, water officials said.
The pump Kannapolis uses to draw water from the reservoir is only 312 feet below the surface now, Wilmer Melton, Kannapolis’ water resources director, said this week.
“Lake Howell continues to drop,” he said. “If we don’t have any rainfall ... Kannapolis will be able to draw from Lake Howell up until April.”
That’s especially bad news since Kannapolis now pulls 2.3 million gallons of water out of Lake Howell each day, accounting for more than a quarter of the approximately 8.25 million gallons Kannapolis water customers use daily.
Constructed in the early 1990s, Lake Howell in northwest Cabarrus is the county’s largest and newest reservoir. At 1,300 acres, it can hold 5 billion gallons, compared to the 1.5-billion-gallon capacity of Kannapolis Lake, the city’s main reservoir.
Kannapolis Lake is just under 70 inches below full, around normal for this time of year but struggling to match the normal upward curve.
Melton had some good news, too. Despite record low stream flows in the Piedmont and western North Carolina, Second Creek in Rowan County has recovered so that the city can now draw up to 5 million gallons of water a day with its station there.
Officials aren’t seeing the same surprise recovery in the creeks that feed Lake Howell and lie in its 47-square-mile watershed in Cabarrus, Rowan and Iredell counties.
Only about 2.3 million gallons of water flow into the reservoir each day, while Kannapolis and Concord pump out nearly 7 million gallons.
Normal stream flow into Lake Howell for November should be about 18 million gallons a day. Henry Waldroup, Concord’s water resources director, called the numbers “discouraging.”
Waldroup said Concord — like Kannapolis, under mandatory water restrictions — has shifted as much consumption as possible to its other two reservoirs. Lake Fisher and Lake Concord both are low but not critical, he said.
Concord, which sells water to Harrisburg and Midland, draws 4.5 million gallons a day from Lake Howell, the minimum the city can take and still operate its Coddle Creek water treatment plant, he said.
Meanwhile, the state is allowing the Water and Sewer Authority of Cabarrus County, which maintains the county-owned reservoir, to release only 600,000 gallons of water downstream each day, compared with the 4 million gallons a day required under normal conditions.
While Concord and Kannapolis officials work with other governments in Rowan, Mecklenburg and Stanly counties to secure more water, they keep a careful watch on their biggest reservoir.
But with national weather forecasters predicting the current drought will last into February at least, they’re watching it shrink slowly.
And that’s bad news all around.
“To put us back in normal operations, we need it to be full over the winter,” Waldroup said.
Contact Scott Jenkins at 704-797-4248 or sjenkins@salisburypost.com
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