Water Authority Pleads For Homeowners To Adjust Lawn Watering Schedules, For Their Own Safety

The Suffolk County Water Authority declared a water emergency across the East End this week and was joined by emergency responders in pleading with property owners to shift lawn watering habits, as weeks of hot, dry weather are taxing the authority’s wells and making it difficult to keep up with demand.

The problem is particularly notable in the early morning hours — and that could hamper firefighting efforts in the event of an emergency.

The surge in demand for water from automatic sprinkler systems clicking on in the early morning hours — primarily between midnight and 7 a.m. — taxes the ability of SCWA well pumps, which are scattered throughout the region, to suck up enough water from the aquifer to maintain pressure in supply lines. If pressure drops too low, service can be hampered, and can even pose a safety risk should a fire break out and fire hydrants not have enough pressure to deliver water strongly enough for firefighters to fight it.

“The tank behind me will have a million gallons of water in it at midnight — within a couple of hours, it will be almost empty,” SCWA Chairman Patrick Halpin said during a press conference at one of the water authority’s gargantuan water storage tanks in Southampton Village, which are used to maintain water pressure in the delivery mains that spider out into surrounding communities.

“Every time it gets to that point, in the event of a fire that requires drawing a lot of water from the fire hydrants, there is the possibility that water will not be available. When we lose water pressure, it puts the hospital at risk, because they cannot get water up to the higher floors. It puts the community at risk.”

He added, “This is serious, and we need to change behavior today.”

The water authority, he reassured, could take drastic steps to cut off water to other sources than fire hydrants in an extreme situation of an emergency, but doing so would not be immediate, when firefighters were scrambling in the early stages of a fire.

“All of our volunteer firefighters out here go into these fires with the expectation in mind that the hydrants in front of a house are going to be functioning,” Southampton Fire Chief Alfred Callahan said at Tuesday’s gathering of regional officials. “We are relying on the general public to change those irrigation clocks, heed the warnings to keep yourselves safe and to keep our volunteers safe.”

As it has done in the past, the SCWA began issuing conservation alerts and placing robocalls to homeowners who connect to the authority’s wells about two weeks ago, asking that they dial back their lawn-watering habits to a few days per week and shift to running automatic sprinklers at times other than between midnight and 7 a.m., when the draw from sprinkler systems is highest.

With no signs of substation shifts in demand, the authority issued the emergency declaration on Friday, initially only for Southampton Village, where a high percentage of properties have automatic irrigation systems, and then expanding it to all of the South Fork and Shelter Island on Tuesday.

The water authority has “serious problems’’ maintaining water pressure in the hamlet of Montauk, he said.

“All we need people to do is shift the time period,” said Joe Pokorny, deputy CEO for operations of the water authority. “Midnight to 6 a.m. — it peaks at 6 a.m., when everyone has their sprinklers running — is the real problem time. We’re running every pump we have, and we still can’t keep up. We only have so many wells.”

Halpin said that shifting the watering schedule for lawns to start at 4 p.m. or 9 p.m. or 7:15 a.m. would help ease the strain on the system, especially at larger properties with extensive irrigation systems.

The average home in Suffolk County uses 130,000 gallons of water per year. There are more than 300 properties on the South Fork, mostly in Southampton, that use more than 1 million gallons per year. More than 70 percent of that goes to lawn irrigation, he said.

He also asked that some homeowners shift to only watering every other day.

Mike Dwyer of the Irrigation Association of New York, an industry advocacy group, said that cutting the times a sprinkler is programmed to run in half, and splitting it between late afternoon and early morning is a better way to water grass and other plants anyway, because it allows for better absorption of water.

When water pressure is lower because of high demand from surrounding areas, irrigation systems will not function correctly anyway, he said, and could result in brown spots where sprinklers adjusted at full pressure in the spring, are missing areas of lawn because of reduced pressure.

WiFi-enabled systems can also save water by adjusting watering when rain is imminent or recent.

Watering lawns in the early morning hours has become a matter of practice, for both common sense practical reasons and for some that may be a bit overwrought. Watering in the middle of the day is understood to be foolhardy, as much of the water will evaporate before it can soak into the ground sufficiently to satiate the needs of grass. But watering in the evening hours is avoided because of concerns that grass that is left soaking for too long in the cool hours will develop fungal and mold problems.

Pokorny says that belief is misplaced in the coastal Northeast, where fungus is not an issue and sand soils drain well.

“We would like to see more people set their systems to go on at 9 p.m.,” he said. “And alternating days is more than sufficient. A lawn does not need to be watered every day. All you need is a good soaking twice a week. That is adequate to keep a lawn healthy.”

Once only the realm of large estates, automatic sprinkler systems are now common at properties of all sizes throughout the region, the water authority chief said, and that is increasingly taxing the ability to deliver water and maintain pressure at safe levels. The issue is not water supply — the region’s deep aquifer provides ample resources — but the ability to draw up the water through a limited number of wells.

The water authority uses large storage tanks, capable of holding nearly a million gallons each, to maintain the pressure in the delivery lines. The authority has built new tanks in Wainscott and Amagansett in recent years to keep up with the draw-down of growing demand. As the tank levels drop in the early morning hours and pumps struggle to refill them, the concern over pressure grows.

Pokorny said that SCWA staff are constantly monitoring the status of the system and should pressure issues become dire, the SCWA does have the ability to curtail pressure or shut off water delivery in certain areas to ensure it is sufficient to meet emergency needs. He said that would be an “extreme measure,” however, and the group would prefer that customers make changes voluntarily.

“The problem is, we’ve done the robocalls, we’ve issued these appeals and we don’t really see a difference in demand,” he said. “We just need some relief.”