EVA — Despite assurances from their supplier that water will be available through the lingering drought, Eva residents are nervous.

Several are considering cleaning out their wells to have them operational by summer. Marigurette Alexander said she and her husband, Cleo, have been concerned for some time.

“He tried cleaning ours a couple of years ago, but it is near pecan trees and roots had run down into the well,” she said. “He tried different ways of getting them out but wasn’t successful. If it comes to it, in a have-to case, we’ll try again.”

Dr. Larry Fite, who worked out of a trailer as Eva’s first physician and lives in Gandys Cove four miles north of Eva, said he has an old well that could be utilized. He said neighbors are looking at their wells and determining what it would take to connect them.

“As a doctor, I’m looking at a worst-case scenario, a dry winter,” he said. “Maybe officials are doing everything that can be done, but we feel we’re in a semi-crisis. We’re worried about the lake getting bone dry, and we can’t always depend on tropical systems.”

The lake is Lake Catoma in Cullman County, a 500-acre reservoir rated at 24 million gallons a day. Built during the mid-1960s, the lake is owned by Cullman Utilities. The city of Cullman is its only customer.

The Cullman County Water Department and several independent systems, however, purchase water wholesale from the city. The county system, which has 15,500 customers, supplies Eva, Oden Ridge and Gum Pond. In addition to Cullman and Morgan counties, it also has customers in Winston and Walker counties.

“I don’t think Eva running out of water is an option,” said Manager David Bussman. “Our contract requires the city to deliver us up to 160 million gallons of water a month. Currently, we’re using a little more than 100 million gallons. We get close to our maximum in the summer months but that’s it.”

That doesn’t mean that Bussman and other officials aren’t wary of the havoc that a continuing drought could cause.

Cullman Mayor Donald Green said, as of Thursday, Lake Catoma was 241/2 feet below full pool.

“We met Wednesday with an engineering firm putting together definite plans for short- and long-term solutions,” he said.

Dale Greer, Cullman Economic Development Agency assistant director, said a member of the firm, Steve Newton of Ch2M Hill of Birmingham, met Thursday with Alabama Department of Environmental officials to discuss options and get ADEM’s approval. He will make a formal report to the utilities board Jan. 29.

170-day supply

“If there is no rain, Lake Catoma has about a 170-day supply of water,” Greer said. “All estimates from engineers and forecasters is that the Southeast could be in the middle of a two-year drought.”

He mentioned four short-term options. One would be to tap Lake George, owned by the city and once Cullman’s primary water source. It is rated to produce about 3 million gallons a day in drought conditions. He said it would require installing an intake line of less than a mile and pumping water to a hill on top of the Lake Catoma drainage basin.

“It would drain naturally into the lake,” Greer said, “and in less than two months, we’d have all of that water, which would add another 15 to 20 days to our system.”

He said Ingram Lake of similar size is about two miles southeast of Lake Catoma. Greer said it is privately owned and used by the Golden Rod Poultry Processing Plant. He said the board would have to reach an agreement with the landowner to transport the water.

“There’s no natural drainage there and we’d have to run a pipe to Lake Catoma,” he said. “We could get 3 to 4 million gallons out of there for a couple of months.”

Greer said another temporary solution is Eight Mile Creek, below the city’s water treatment plant, where the board could get perhaps 1 million gallons a day.

“Then there’s Lake Catoma itself,” he said. “We don’t have an intake below 50 feet. We could float a pontoon with a pump. As the water drops, the pontoon drops and we could pump water back up. That’s the last place to take any water out.”

He said at those locations, it would take workers 15 to 20 days to get the lines and pumps installed.

At the same time, Bussman is busy considering the county’s short-term options. One involves availability of water from the Northeast Morgan County Water and Sewer Authority at Somerville.

“They’ve offered us some water if we can get it over Brewer Mountain,” Bussman said. “It would require a little bit of line work and a small pumping station that would take only about 30 days.”

Bobby Taylor, general manager of Northeast Morgan County, underscores the fix would be temporary.

“We could only serve them enough water so that it wouldn’t impact our customers,” he said. “It wouldn’t be that much but would help serve part of that area.”

Northeast Morgan County gets its water from Decatur Utilities. Taylor said his pump station can move 5 million gallons a day.

“During the drought last summer, we pumped 72 million gallons one month, approaching 2.5 million gallons a day,” he said. “Our capabilities to get water to Cullman County would be less than a million gallons a day. Our line that goes up through there is not large enough to push more than that through the line and still serve our customers off that line, and what’s expected about normal usage in a drought.”

Taylor said Cullman County assisted his agency when it had a shortage of water during the 1980s.

“We have a tie-in, a small line, with them at Cole Spring, near Falkville,” he said. “We bought water from them for a few months. We’re just trying to be a good neighbor. But any lines run up there would be at their expense, and ADEM would have to permit whatever we decide to do for each other.”

In other considerations, Bussman said, his system already has an interconnect with the Arley Water Department in Winston County and all that would be required would be installing new meters.

“That would be pretty much on an emergency basis, though,” he said. “If Arley has a break going across the hollows, they couldn’t feed until they got their line fixed. They get their water from Smith Lake.”

Bussman said another short-term solution would involve the Blount County Water Authority.

“We have lines on the west side of the bridge at the county line on U.S. 278,” he said. “Blount’s lines are on the east side. We’d just have to connect them together.”

Long term, Bussman is looking at property his system owns just past Valhermoso Springs, at the end of Plymouth Rock Road.

“We submitted a permit with TVA on Sept. 12 to withdraw water there out of the Tennessee River,” he said. “We’re waiting on TVA.”

The drawback, he said, is that if the agency granted the permit today, it would be a slow fix.

“Including the engineering, installing lines and building a filter plant, we would be looking at three to five years out,” he said. “But the end result of that project alone would mean that we’d be using 40 percent less water out of Lake Catoma.”

In addition to Bussman’s long-term proposal, Greer said the utilities board is considering a plan created by the Army Corps of Engineers and other engineering firms that was part of a 1993 study.

“We conducted the study with a $5 million grant, and we’re in negotiations with the county now,” Greer said.

He said the evaluation points to constructing a dam on Duck River that would create a 650-acre reservoir capable of providing 32 million gallons of water a day. Duck River is on U.S. 278, six miles east of the Cullman water plant.

“It would be a three- to four-year construction process and cost an estimated $60 million,” Greer said. “But it would take us out 50 years plus.”

Environmental groups oppose the Duck River project.

Eva folks remain edgy and haven’t abandoned consideration of resurrecting their wells and intensifying water conservation efforts.

“We have a well at our home,” said Eva Town Clerk Judy Fortenberry. “We’re not going to clean it out now, but we may do it next summer if the need arises.”

But she is confident that, if people continue the conservation program, Eva will be in good shape.

“We can handle this. We can deal with it,” she said.

Cullman Mayor Green said the program is working well.

“In December 2007, we used almost 50 million gallons of water less than in December 2006,” he said. “We asked for a 10 percent reduction, and our people gave us a savings of almost 15 percent. Everybody is concerned. All you have to do is to drive across Lake Catoma and you see a definite need.”

The outlook

Michelle Parcus, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said the Huntsville area ended 2007 some 28.86 inches below the amount of normal rainfall.

“We got 28.65 inches, so we got about half of what we should have gotten,” she said.

For this year, as of Jan. 14, the area had received 1.05 inches of rain, a deficit of 1.47 inches.

“We’re doing pretty good so far,” she said. “We’ve had more rain in the past few weeks than we had during the past few months.”

She said the three-month outlook from February into April shows a split.

“We’re on the fringe of things. North of us has a better chance and south of us is below normal,” she said. “The latest drought outlook through March calls for the drought to continue but to improve somewhat.”

Ronnie Thomas