Welcome everybody to the work session on water supply.

Counselor Jonathan Lambert Melton is absent and excused.

And we will call up Whitwheeler to kick us off.

Actually, Ed's gonna take a presentation, and then we'll pass it to the Okay.

Okay.

Thank you for having us today.

Again, my name is Ed Bucken.

I'm with Raleigh Water.

And I'm going to start off with a quick update about where we are from a drought perspective.

As you can see from this map, most of North Carolina remains at in some level of drought designation.

However, this is a dramatic improvement from what we saw back in June, where many areas of North Carolina, especially the Falls Lake Basin were in the D5 exceptional drought designation.

That's the most intense level of drought.

So we received a tremendous amount of rainfall on July 23rd.

Places in Falls Lake Basin received between four and five inches.

So really the lake came up in about two feet in a couple days, so uh a tremendous amount of rainfall, very restorative rainfall during that time.

So we we didn't haven't seen as much rain in August.

It's been a little drier as you know.

We did get a little bit of rain this past Saturday, uh about an inch in the basin, which was we're sort of stabilized at the water supply pool right now, um, which is a good thing.

It's not that unusual for it to be at this level uh this time of year.

Falls tend to be very dry here if you don't get uh tropical events, which we don't have, quite frankly, any on the uh outlook right now.

Uh of course that can change uh very short sh very quickly.

Um again, we're at 79% uh water supply pool right now.

Uh that's you know, we were down around 60 percent back in June, so in a lot better position.

And our drought trigger for to go back into stage one uh would be 45 percent.

So we're really a long ways from that.

Our pumpage is pretty much stabilized around 66 million gallons a day.

So overall, we're in a good position.

And one of the reasons why we feel confident about that is is because of this graphic here that I'm showing you.

What you're looking at is a statistical output of a model called Oasis that looks at over a uh 90 years of hydrologic data for the Falls Lake Basin.

And we can run different scenarios with this model.

And so what you're seeing there is the is the red is your basically 10% or less chance of this becoming a reality.

So there's a very slim chance that we would even get close to 50% over the next few months, and a very, very good chance that we would recover uh this winter, based on all the historical data that we have.

And I'll touch on this a little bit later, but we're also seeing that very strong La Niña uh signal that we saw earlier in the year, and I guess uh latter part of 2025 finally fade, and we're switching back to a kind of a moderate uh El Niño.

So the next three to four months, um, the latest weather forecast means above average rainfall.

So we'll certainly take that, and that's usually our refill cycle in uh November, December, January.

So I also want to provide a big a quick recap on how we manage through the drought.

As I mentioned several months ago, this drought was really unique and unusual because of when it started, which was it got very intense in the winter and spring months.

Have not seen that before.

So we were one of the first systems, if not the first uh large system in North Carolina to go into drought restrictions on April 20th because the Falls Lake had never been full uh in April and until this past April.

So this was uh a really unusual event for us.

So we we took that step um pretty early.

And then in April and and much of May, we saw what we would consider very good compliance by looking at our pumpage reports.

We can see that the irrigation was limited to Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so we would expect those days to be higher, and they were uh largely for that first part of after uh we adopted the plan.

And so that the demand increase from from irrigation would be seven to sixteen million gallons.

That's roughly anywhere twenty-five, twenty-eight percent increase on those Tuesdays and Wednesdays from your normal pumpage, which is around sixty million gallons a day.

However, as it got drier in the latter part of May and into June, we started to see non-irrigation days, basically the same as irrigation days in terms of pumpage and demand.

So we would see 73 million gallons on a Tuesday, 72 on a Wednesday, then 71 on a Thursday when you're not supposed to be irrigating.

So we took the step of of looking at all of our irrigation accounts.

We have about 11,000 of those separate meters.

So that so these are meters designated uh only for irrigation use.

We looked at them and we looked at them on three days that irrigation was not permitted.

And if we saw usage over one C CF, that's one cubic foot, 748 gallons, we flagged that for a citation, that means that they were being used.

Um we we were able to actually in incentivize a lot of folks, I'll say, to remain in compliance.

And so we saw a great response in July where that that pumpage was still very hot, but that pumpage went back down to 60 million gallons a day.

So uh that's all pretty good news, and then of course the best news was July 23rd when we got a lot of rain and we were able to exit on August 3rd.

So as a lot of you know, um we are gonna take another look at our water shortage response plan.

Um there's always opportunity to uh improve things and change some things after you implement it.

We don't implement this thing very often, thankfully.

So we are going to be looking at what sort of discretionary water uses um are regulated.

Does that need to change?