Orange County NC Website
gallons, and a total storage capacity of 7.4 million gallons. We have a safe yield from all of those lakes, I <br />might mention the slide here says one billion gallons when empty. We have some physical limitations that <br />would put us in a tough situation to have to achieve getting that last one billion gallons of water out of the <br />lake. That is not to say we couldn't do it if we had to. But we don't count on it in our safe yield calculations. <br />We have 37 million gallons a day, based an a 50-year safe yield, using the storage that we have readily <br />available to us. We also have a web page that we keep up to date. Ever since last summer we've started <br />doing this and you can ga to our web page and see current lake levels and what our situation is at anytime. <br />The web page is www.ci.durham.nc.us. We set a record low level last year in bath Lake Mickey and the Little <br />River. Everybody knows it has been a pretty dry period. Our low levels in Lake Mickey got to 318.2 on <br />December 26, 2001 and the previous record low level had occurred in 1998. The Little River got down to <br />326.6, an January 6, 2002. That also set a record law level for us. Our current situation is Lake Mickey has <br />come back up about 19.65 feet, but we are still 3.15 feet below full. We were full about a month ago at Lake <br />Mickey, but the dry weather has started to pull it back dawn again, or the demand combined with the dry <br />weather. And Little River Lake hasn't filled up yet this year, which is kind of unusual for us. We have never <br />in the history of Durham not been full by the first of April, so we are kind of plowing new ground this year. We <br />are not concerned about it yet, but if it continues, we'll start to look a little closer at that. But we are about six <br />feet down still in Little River, but we've come up 22 feet. So we are a lot better than we were. <br />This is a projection of our demand. We are expecting to meet our average daily demand. Our raw <br />water safe yield at 37 million gallons per day, we would expect to meet about 2010, just a little beyond 2010. <br />of course, with the State guidelines at 80°~ of that number, we would be bumping up against that 80% <br />number about 2005. Because of that, we have a pending application now with the State for allocation from <br />Jordan Lake. Our water treatment capacity is currently 52 million gallons a day, and we have an expansion <br />underway now to increase that to 61 million gallons per day, but that's not finished yet. Our peak demand <br />would hit that 52 million gallon per day, based on the projection of previous demand, just beyond 2005 and hit <br />the 61 at about 2015. And again, we have the same 80°~ rule for water supply and water treatment, so we <br />would need to be looking at further expansion probably before that time. <br />The questions included a question about projection of population, and this is from our planning <br />department. We are projecting all the way to 2050 a population in Durham of about 329,000 people. At <br />2020, about 276,000. <br />These are our projected demands. In 2020, the projected demand is right out of our Jordan Lake <br />application. This is dealing with raw water supply, so the average daily 2020 demand is about 45, exceeding <br />our current 37. The 2050 demand is about 54 million gallons a day. <br />This is just something I threw in here so you can kind of see what we have been up against the <br />last several years, and most of you know what you have been up against. These are the lake levels of Lake <br />Mickey and Little River and the record low levels that we reached in 2001-2002. And you can see we came <br />close to that except for Little River in 1998. And I will mention, one thing we did this year and back in the fall; <br />having had the two dry years pretty much in a row, we typically don't see three dry years in a row, and really <br />didn't anticipate this year being as dry as its been. So we needed to do some work on Little River Lake and <br />we pulled the lake down intentionally for some of that work, and you can see that flat line on the curve there <br />where we were doing that work and the lake level just held steady while we were doing that. But Lake <br />Mickey continued to fall and meet the needs of the city, and so it reached pretty low levels. But we were able <br />to meet all the needs of the city during that period of time, and we did get to stage two of our water <br />conservation ordinance, which is a voluntary conservation, but we didn't run out of water. <br />Some of our potential future water supply we have in planning is the 10 million gallons per day <br />from Jordan Lake. We have been looking at Teer Quarry as a passible storage facility that could yield us <br />three to five million gallons. All of the water didn't get allocated from Jordan Lake, sa there is the potential we <br />might get additional allocations from Jordan Lake in the future. We have been acquiring land since about <br />1989 around Lake Mickey far the possible future expansion of Lake Mickey by either raising that dam or <br />building a new dam. That's probably our most expensive alternative. It's not easy to raise an existing dam. <br />The current dam is about 80 feet tall, and the new dam would be probably 120 feet tall, so it is not going to be <br />a cheap dam to build when we have to build it. There is the possibility of a reservoir an the upper flat as well <br />that could either combine with the expansion of Lake Mickey or substitute far the expansion of Lake Mickey. <br />We don't have any land acquired for that, and most of that would be in Person County, so there is an issue of <br />interlocal cooperation to get that lake to became a reality. As part of our Upper Neuse Basin Study recently, <br />we did realize that that upper flat lake could provide some water quality benefits for Lake Mickey, so there <br />might be same reasons for doing a lake above Lake Mickey just to provide water supply and water quality <br />