July 1, 2008

(The Palmetto State) - I was going to write about how wonderful it is to be protected by our fabulous Independence Declaration and Constitution, but others have beaten me to it.   However, there is a juicy little truth that everybody, including your local news pezzanovanti have either overlooked or forgotten about:

There isn't really a true drought in South Carolina.

First of all, it HAS rained in many many places in the Upstate, in some cases, more than the Lowcountry (and it rains buckets in many places, there, every day.) Some of the places it has not rained a lot is at local AIRPORTS, where NOAA doubles with the FAA to get their weather conditions. There is a reason why this happens, the big one being that all that asphalt creates heat which acts as a wedge, shooing little rain drops in other directions. It has to rain A LOT in order for the weather guages to record SOME rain. This does not happen all the time, but is does happen a lot of the time. Airports also act as heat sinks which increase the actual temperature. The more airports there are, the more reports of higher temperatures as opposed to reports from years ago.

In the second place, South Carolina is a savannah. The online dictionaries don't give a proper geological or hydroponic definition of a savannah - the closest I found was "a grassy plain scattered with trees." But a real savannah is an area east of a mountain range which progressively becomes barren over thousands of years. Savannahs are areas that dry out. Look at Sudan. That is what South Carolina will look like in about 50,000 to 100,000 years. It's called "desertification." But we are nowhere near that.

Thirdly, South Carolina has two ancient aquifers or water sources. They are ancient because they have been feeding the Palmetto State since some time after the Appalachians formed - over a 500 million years ago in the cavernous areas formed by the Iapetan faults which pepper the range. They are also ancient because it takes 8 million years for water to process through the stony layers. That's eight million years. Unless and until it rains so little that the aquifer shuts down, we won't know about it for at least four million years, when the pressure drops to half, if in fact it does drop (some hydrogeologists think the pressure on aquifers comes from other natural pressures, not supply.)

Fourth, the Army Corps of Engineers is not noted for their genius when it comes to guessing lake levels. The old folks will tell you that before the great depression works projects which created our wonderful lakes, rivers in the upstate remained fairly constant. It was, and continues to be, the use of water by downstaters which have caused the water to ebb and flow. That's fine. We all love the same state. But to say there is a "Critical" drought situation, when the supply affect has not been that great, is simply not so.

It is no wonder that the recent meeting of the Governor's gang of water boys and girls decided not to call for fire restrictions. And that's not to say the state is soaking wet, it's not. And there are some places where it's dry enough to hurt. But, what we really need is a new system of realistic assessment of our beloved state's water policies by our legislature.

In any case, I would be far more worried about what we PUT INTO the water than how much we have.

I have to stop writing, now. We're having another rain and thunderstorm, and I don't want my computer to fry. Or drown.

- Dick Anderson