JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Though we’ve seen some rain, many people may not realize it’s not alleviating drought conditions. There’s an ongoing need to conserve water.
The St. Johns River Water Management District took the time to talk to us today about why water conservation remains so important.
The northern portions of the District remain some of the driest areas as rainfall is not exceeding evapotranspiration, therefore not providing aquifer recharge.
Clay Coarsey, Director of the Division of Water Supply Planning and Assessment, “just wanting to remind everyone that we still have some extremely low levels in the aquifer and still need to be taking those conservation measures seriously even though we’ve had some of those afternoon thunderstorms rolling through.”
Coarsey continues, “we aren’t at record lows, but we are certainly approaching record lows. If we don’t start to get this rainfall that comes through.
And, I think one other thing that a lot of people tend to forget about with the rainfall that happens in the summertime is we normally get a lot of rainfall in the summertime, right? And that we’ve actually been getting a little bit less than we should have been getting up through July.
And that with the heat and the evaporation and the transpiration from the plants, you end up losing a lot of that rainfall and it doesn’t make it down into the aquifer where we can have it stored for use later.“