An eighty-five-year-old water tower started to leak. Then there wasn’t enough rain.
“Maybe you’re not washing your car or putting that extra water on your lawn like you might like to have done,” Village of Interlaken Mayor Rich Richardson said Tuesday. Taking steps to conserve water in the village, Richardson says, has become the norm for residents.
Village of Interlaken residents try to conserve water(video)
“I think it’s something that everybody’s gotten used to over the past several years,” Richardson said. “The Village gets all its water form a well system and we either have a lot of rain or we have none at all.”
And when there’s none at all, the well struggles to keep up with daily consumption.
Seneca County DES issues mandatory water conservation orders for Village
We caught up Mary Jump, the Director of Environmental Services in Seneca County. Jump says currently, a mandatory water conservation order is in effect, which means residents are asked to do their part to use less water.
“With the dry conditions, their well isn’t quite able to keep up with demands so we are asking the residents in the village to conserve water to help with that so we don’t come to a point where they run out of water,” Jump said.
Mayor says there is a plan to fix water-supply issues
Mayor Richardson says he’s working to make water-supply issues a thing of the past.
“When I got on the board in 2015 as water commissioner, the first thing we did was working on, how are we going to fix the problem.”
A problem, the Mayor says, is two-fold.
“We had the issue with at 85-year old water tower that was starting to leak and then the issue with not having enough water to keep it full,” Richardson said.
So FingerLakes1.com asked what they are doing to solve the problem.
“So that there’s no drought issues into the future, instead of running off a well, the well will become our secondary source,” Richardson said. “The line into the lake will become our primary source. So we’ll have a line going into the lake and running through a brand new filtration plant.”
The Mayor hopes the construction will start this fall, and by next summer the village will get its water from a new lake line, so they won’t have worry about a lack of water for residents in the future.
For water conservation tips, click here.
Related: Water conservation order for Interlaken again
Rebecca is a veteran multimedia journalist serving as one of our core reporters in the Finger Lakes region. She is responsible for telling stories that matter to every day Upstate New Yorkers. Have a question or lead? Send it to [email protected].