Rich rain: But little flooding despite nearly 2" overnight
Here's the 9:28am look of one low-water area in Charlottesville, the CSX bridge over Main and 14th Streets.PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER
The steady nature of the overnight rainfall combined with the parched earth of the summer's severe drought seemed to limit flooding from the remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole. The Twitter feed of the Newsplex's weather department reports that the storm delivered 1.83" of rain from midnight to 9am. The Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority instituted a call for voluntary water conservation one week ago when the urban reservoirs were around 67 percent of capacity. Yesterday, they were down to 65 percent, but when the figures for Thursday get posted, they'll probably be higher.
Update: The October 1 report shows both the Rivanna and Sugar Hollow reservoirs full and the Ragged Mountain Reservoir, which can't fill itself without a pipeline or a massive rainfall, still 3.3 feet below capacity.
3 comments
Betty,
Thank you for your continued voice on this issue. During periods of drought like we have experienced over the last few months, RWSA wouldn't even have to perform dredging, they could have removed sediment with dump trucks and front-end loaders or track-hoes. There was no water in this sediment. Scoop it up, put it on a truck and drive it away. No dewatering needed. Sediment removal under such conditions would be fast, efficient and cheap compared to dredging. But RWSA did nothing. Maybe during our next 10-year drought we won't have Tom Frederick holed up in an office dreaming of $200M dams.
Oh no! Not another dam thread! :)
side note - I bet the person on the bicycle in the image was mad as a wet nornet because he actually had to obey a red traffic light and stop... or get run over by the white car.
Bob Fenwick walked on the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir.
And yesterday, it was filled, in portions, with nothing but muck.
http://www.nbc29.com/story/13239535/dredging-advocate-makes-point
Today it will be filled with water. South Fork is our most valuable source of water supply, because; with its large water shed it fills very quickly after a rain.
Just dredging this reservoir, keeping it dredged (at a very affordable cost- by selling the dredged material), and continuing the downward trend in water use- will give us all the water we need for 40 years and probably beyond.
RWSA has spent $12 million ratepayer dollars and climbing, to build a dam, with not a drop of water to show for it, in fact, by neglecting South Fork, they have lost water capacity over the last 10 years.
Let's tell our officials to stop stalling. There has NEVER been any dredging of this reservoir to maintain water supply and that is wrong. --and don't let them tell you it can't be done --dredgers all over America reading the fearmongering in our media, about dredging say, we are the laughing stock of the dredging world.
This should not only be a major part of our future water supply plan, but should be what we do first.
http://www2.dailyprogress.com/news/2010/sep/29/dredging-advocate-tries-w...