Shrinking Reservoir (183/365)

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July 2, 2015 – I took a photo of Capilano Lake just a month ago, on May 31st. Capilano Lake is one of our main drinking water reservoirs in Vancouver at a month ago it was full.

With no rain to speak of in the past two months, and not a speck of snow on the mountains, the water is disappearing quickly. We are in no way even remotely close to conditions to the south, but it’s not a stretch to see us getting there if the weather continues to throw hot dry summers and warm winters at us.

Looking at the reservoir I’d estimate that we are about 15 – 20% down already and that means if things hold steady with the weather, that we will probably be seeing heavier water restrictions in the days ahead. We can currently water three days per week, between the hours of 4am and 9am. Nothing is critical right now, the high alpine lakes that are used to refresh the North Shore reservoirs still have water in them, but residents are using more water than normal for this time of year.

Vancouver considers itself blessed with rain, often too much so. But I think we are having that assumption challenged this year. It’s not like we haven’t seen low water before. In 2003, when Kelowna was looking like it was going to be burnt off the face of the planet by wildfires, we saw the reservoir go down to 20% of its normal capacity. Heavy restrictions were placed on our water use, but in a matter of days in October it was back at full capacity. The drought was over in about 48 hours. It can rain that much here…when it wants to.

But these hot dry spells that we are most certainly NOT known for, seem to be occurring more frequently in the 28 years we’ve been living here.

We normally have snowpack on the mountains still, and that replenished the reservoir as it melts. We didn’t have much to begin with this year, and it disappeared early on under winter rains and warm temperatures.

Vancouver began public awareness campaigns for responsible water use back in the 1990’s and they have been successful at convincing us to reduce consumption, but we are still heavy users. It’s hard to comprehend that a temperate rainforest could see the rain become scarce.

During extremely dry periods like this, homeowners are making the choice to let their lawn go brown and conserve. If the hot dry weather continues, presumably we will reach a point where the municipalities will restrict watering to once per week.

While we are still a far cry from the conditions elsewhere, it’s starting to seem like less of an unrealistic scenario that we could be seeing true droughts here in the future….

I wonder what the reservoir will look like come September.