From the desk of Chairman Peter Lent:
On Friday, July 15, 2016, Basil Seggos, Commissioner of NYS Department of Environment of Conservation, issued a drought watch for the entire State of New York. This is the first of four levels of drought conditions. The other three are warning, emergency, and disaster. I have been watching the readings of the USGS Gaging Station at Garbutt. For the past two weeks the discharge at the gaging station has been considerably below the mean daily discharge for those dates. In fact the actual instantaneous discharge has been at, or below the minimum instantaneous discharge ever recorded for these days. (For this time of year, Oatka Creek has less stream flow now, than it has had since recording started in 1945.) Those of you, like me, who are not on public water and have your own well, probably never use your well to water your lawn, but maybe for the flower gardens and vegetable gardens. Since we put in our two rain barrels 3 or 4 years ago, we have never had to water these gardens from our well. However, this year the rain barrels are almost empty. More importantly our farmers are pretty close to the edge on whether their crops will provide sufficient yields. Hopefully the rain will come soon.
From admin:
The OCWC will hold our regular monthly meeting tonight from 6:30 – 8:15 PM in LeRoy’s Woodward Memorial Library. Meetings are open to the public. Come over and see what we are about!
