Drought Conditions, Excess Water Usage Lead To State Of Emergency

SARASOTA COUNTY, FL — A state of emergency was declared in Sarasota County Wednesday due to low water pressure caused by drought conditions, water system changes and customer usage.

According to the emergency declaration, Sarasota County was at 550 on the Keetch-Byram Drought Index Wednesday. That scale runs from 0 to 800 with 800 being desert conditions. Anything about 400 indicates a risk of fire.

“The drought condition poses an immediate and present danger to the health and safety of Sarasota County, necessitating the exercise of all reasonable preparatory, precautionary and remedial measures,” Jonathan Lewis, county administrator, wrote in his emergency declaration.

In a video shared to the county’s Facebook page, Public Utilities Director Mike Mylett said water at the Bee Ridge Wastewater Reclamation Facility is “considerably lower than we’ve seen it…in the past.”

While the system has been “overflowing” in the past, “now we’re almost empty in this pond,” he said. “This time of year, everyone is using a lot of reclaimed water for irrigation and now that the reclaimed water systems are running low, they’re turning to potable water for irrigation purposes.”

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Normally, during this time of year about 24 million gallons of water are distributed into the system each day, Mylett said. The county experienced a record demand for potable water — more than 30 million gallons — on Tuesday.

The county’s water reclamation facilities only treated 15 million gallons of wastewater Tuesday, which meant half the water used that day went into the environment, mostly through irrigation, he said.

With the emergency declaration, the use of potable water for residential lawn irrigation is now banned.

Mylett said residents connected to the county’s potable water system should “limit their outdoor use of water…Anything that can reduce the amount of water they’re using within the system can help balance our system back to a more normal state.”

He expects the system will “normalize, hopefully, over the next several days.”