The Western Governors' Association, the National Drought Policy Commission
and its successor effort, the Interim National Drought Council, have made drought
monitoring and prediction a top priority since the prolonged 1986-1993 drought in the
western United States and subsequent drought in the southern Great Plains two years
later. While drought is almost an expected occurrence in the west and mid-west, the
multi-year droughts continued and expanded into the east and southeast in Georgia,
Florida, Alabama and Texas, and up the eastern seaboard into Maine and Vermont in the
mid to late 1990s. When drought impacts were felt in the Washington, DC area,
however, lawmakers were faced with a flood of calls from nearby Maryland and Virginia,
asking what they could do to help agricultural, residential, commercial, industrial and
domestic water users. At the center of the dialog was the need to improve the ability to
predict drought occurrences along with the sharing of ways to respond to drought
impacts.
Quietly, however, federal, state and local water managers were asking the third
question: what good is prediction if your drought program still features response
measures? Their follow on question was: how can we better predict drought
occurrences; and, based on that information, what measures can we take before drought
occurs to lessen or even eliminate the impacts? The national and state leaders discovered
the answers were imbedded in the suite of water resources management tools featuring a
combination of facilities planning, operational flexibilities, progressive conservation
measures, water recycling, and new supply development such as desalination and
emergency storage and management measures. The challenge they also recognized is
how to develop support for preparedness programs that may be costly, to alleviate
impacts that are predicted to occur in the future? How can water managers generate the
interest and create a platform for a drought preparedness dialog with their communities
during times when water is plentiful and the memory of drought has waned?
The answer may lie in developing a community friendly, conceptual cost/benefit
analytical process that involves traditional cost accounting and incorporates community
values and assessments of their concerns and preferences on an equal basis with
traditional engineering cost/benefit analysis.
| Edition : | Vol. - No. |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 310 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 15 |
| Published : | 06/17/2004 |
