AWWA ACE59988

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.