How Dry I Am

Ever since 1776, when Manhattan's first reservoir was built on lower Broadway and pipes made of hollow logs were laid in the streets, New York City has been trying to keep ahead of its thirst. At first it was a simple process; though the population jumped from 22,000 to 60,000 in the 25 years after the Revolution, many of the newcomers simply dug their own wells. But as the city mushroomed into a monstrous mechanism of steel, stone and subterranean conduits, it became helplessly dependent on the surrounding country.

Its aqueducts crept out like thirsty tubular feelers to the watersheds of Long Island and the Catskills. It built 18 big dams, stored water in 30 lakes and reservoirs, laid 5,200 miles of mains and pipes to feed the city's hidden lacework of metal capillaries. But World War II, which halted work on a new aqueduct, boosted the city's ever-rising population alarmingly. Last summer's grass-crisping drought did the rest.

High & Dry. Last week New York, and many of the 80 surrounding towns which suck like clustering leeches on its water lines, were getting perilously close to that unimaginable point at which water would no longer run from millions of kitchen faucets. Its dams stood high and dry above great barren expanses of frozen mud; only 33.4% of the city's 253 billion gallons of stored water was left and the supply was being relentlessly lowered at a rate of some 800 million gallons every day.

New York reacted to history's worst water crisis much as it had reacted to the news that German planes might blow it up: nobody really believed it, but everybody did his best to see that somebody else did something about it. Even Communist officials urged their members to save water. Subway posters, newspaper advertisements, and radio announcers ceaselessly proclaimed the emergency. Station WOR distinguished itself in particular with a doggerel sung to the tune of Turkey in the Straw:

Turn off the hot tap, turn off the cold; Water is precious, scarcer than gold, Remember the supply is very very short, Don't use a gallon when you can use a quart!

Undeterred by the fact that industry--particularly breweries, laundries and power plants--gulped up almost half the city's water and that one leaking toilet could waste a million gallons a year, the patriotic launched dozens of odd water-saving schemes. Restaurants quit volunteering water with meals; citizens had to ask bravely for it or do without. A New Rochelle teacher forbade her pupils to paint with watercolors. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals turned off its 38 horse-watering troughs. Neighborhood snoops began gossiping about drips, instead of drunks.

Showers, Please. The city forbade its citizens to wash automobiles, trucks, railroad cars, building fronts or sidewalks. Judges fined the hapless for wasting water and the cops set out to recruit an army of 10,000 civilian faucet inspectors. The citizenry was implored to fix all leaks, take quick showers instead of tub baths and not let the water run while scrubbing its teeth--appeals which lost some force when excavators loosened a plug in a Manhattan water main and squirted 40,000 gallons over the surrounding neighborhood. The city's excitement finally had some effect; but though New Yorkers reduced their normal per capita usage of 150 gallons of water a day to 128, the saving was not enough to halt the drain on reservoirs.*

This week the water department was asking citizens to observe a voluntary weekly "water vacation" of several hours. If it didn't work, and there was no relief from heavy rains or melting snows, pressure would probably be cut--a rationing measure already adopted by several cities in dry New Jersey. This would avert any real danger. But it would force millions in the perpendicular metropolis to go to the lower floors of buildings for their water; rationing could also shut down great chunks of industry, leave the nation's greatest city crippled, dirty and almost as difficult a place to live in as a frontier mining camp.

*Daily per capita water consumption of other big U.S. cities: Chicago, 234 gallons; Philadelphia, 168; Los Angeles, 151; Cleveland, 187; Boston, 117; Detroit, 147; St. Louis, 192.

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