Water

In the middle of this wave of heat, the city of Bend put out some information about how it would curtail water if it had a water shortage.

“This is not an alert and the City is not currently in any stage of its water curtailment plan,” the city’s announcement said.

But still, why now?

The city told us it wants to ensure people know there is a plan. This is also a time of peak water demand. It’s hot. It’s a worrisome fire season.

The city’s water supply doesn’t just provide water people can drink, clean, bathe and irrigate with. It also needs to keep 20 pounds per square inch of water pressure in the system and have enough water around so it can put out fires.

The actual triggers for future water curtailment could be some sort of system damage or disruption of the supplies to treat water, a fire in the watershed that serves Bend, and so on.

The city’s plan for water curtailment has three stages. At the first stage, it would ask for voluntary reductions and ask people to stop landscape irrigation. Step up the stages and the restrictions and enforcement step up. At stage three, the restrictions would be enforceable with “using water not necessary for human consumption and sanitation can come with a maximum civil penalty of $400 per day.”

Living in the High Desert, we should treat water as precious and look for ways to conserve — whether or not the city is ordering us to do so.