Drought Leaves Midwest Towns ‘Drier Than the Dust Bowl’
Scarce water can mean empty wells, dry streambeds and parking port-a-potties at sporting events
Towns in Mid-America are facing water shortages as they grapple with a multiyear drought.
The southeast Kansas city of Caney will run out of water by March 1 without rain, officials said. Its school district has moved to a four-day week to conserve water. Four wells in Belle Plaine, Iowa, are producing 40% as much water as usual. Residents of Osceola, near Des Moines, can be fined $65 or more if they defy water restrictions.
Residents in many towns aren’t allowed to wash their cars. Port-a-potties have replaced some public bathrooms.
“We’re hoping it just rains,” said James Rainbolt, manager of a wholesale water plant that supplies parts of four counties in southern Kansas. “We’re at the mercy of the weather.”
Water scarcity, an issue that has long troubled the arid West, has become an urgent problem this year for small communities across Middle America. Experts in public-water systems and hydrology said the crises reflect rainfall patterns, a changing climate and some small towns’ limited ability to take on costly infrastructure projects that could expand their water supplies.
Lu Liu, an Iowa State University professor with expertise in water-resources engineering, said climate change had exacerbated droughts in many regions and would continue to do so by making them more frequent, longer and more severe.
Nearly the entire state of Iowa is in drought, with a large portion in extreme drought, the second most intense category tracked by the U.S. Drought Monitor. Parts of central and southeast Kansas also are experiencing extreme drought. Parts of southeast Nebraska are in exceptional drought, the most intense category.
Back-to-back years of drought have worsened the situation in some areas, drying out soil deeper underground—like a steadily draining bank account. When rain does fall, some of the moisture goes to paying off bills—“refilling the dry soils or refilling shallow groundwater,” said Tim Hall, hydrologist for Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources.
Two counties in Iowa have had the driest three-year period on record, going back at least to the 1890s, he said.
“Drier than the Dust Bowl years,” he said.
Dozens of other communities are “carefully watching well levels and streams,” Hall said, “trying to make sure they don’t end up in the same situation as Belle Plaine or Osceola,” which are experiencing water shortages.
Belle Plaine, population 2,400, is near the epicenter of the Iowa drought. Streams and tributaries of the Iowa River have little to no water and have weeds growing in them, said city administrator Stephen Beck.
“There were times that I checked the humidity with my phone app and it was 29%,” said Beck, who previously served as water superintendent. “Just a little bit more humid than the Sahara Desert.”
In August, Belle Plaine began tapping into an emergency well that reaches deep underground and produces water heavy with iron and manganese. Local officials mix that in with water from their four low-producing wells, which are 10 to 12 feet below where they normally are, Beck said.
The city is working on longer-term solutions, including a treatment plant to purify water from the emergency well. While the ground is dry, Beck wants to drill more shallow wells and surround them with wetlands that will help catch rainwater.
Near the Kansas-Oklahoma border, in Caney, bottled water is stacked outside the Casey’s convenience store and city hall. The city pool is closed. One of the city’s largest water users, the school district, recently began teaching in-person four days a week instead of five.
Superintendent Blake Vargas said more than half the students live in rural areas served by other water systems, so it is easier on the city for them to be at home, using water from other sources.
The district has turned off water fountains, limited locker-room showers, trucked in trailer restrooms with pre-filled water tanks, and changed its lunch service to minimize using water to clean trays or prepare meals. Officials bring out port-a-potties at athletic events and have turned off urinals, which are now cleaned with bottled water and disinfectant, Vargas said.
Since Oct. 27, the district’s water use has decreased to 2,700 gallons or less a day, compared with nearly 6,000 gallons on Oct. 23. Its use hit 1,870 gallons on Nov. 10.
Caney, population 1,800, gets its water from two sources, the Little Caney River and Timber Hill Lake. The river’s flow has dwindled. Timber Hill Lake will run out around March 1 without more rain, said city administrator Kelley Zellner.
“We’ll probably drain it dry,” he said. “There’s still going to be water for the aquatic life. But yeah, we’re probably going to get down to that.”
Both the city and school district are trying to find long-term options. Zellner said Caney hopes to run a large water line to Coffeyville, a nearby city, and connect a smaller pipe to a rural water district. He has met with Kansas emergency-management officials to see if they can truck in water.
“If this drought continues, we have to have answers,” he said. “We can’t just run out of water.”
In some towns, older or imperfect infrastructure has made water shortages worse.
Caney’s municipal water-distribution system has many leaks, according to Connie Owen, director of the Kansas Water Office. “Their amount of ‘unaccounted for’ water could be as high as 50%,” she said.
Zellner said the city had in recent months patched nine longtime leaks in the aged system. The leaks became more apparent in the dry conditions, he said.
Elsewhere, officials said they have tried to improve water infrastructure but have run into headwinds finding funding or the political will to do so.
Officials in Osceola, Iowa, have for decades tried to build a reservoir to keep up with growing demand from industrial, commercial and agricultural users and a growing population, said city administrator Ty Wheeler. They also wanted an alternative to West Lake, the city’s current water supply, which is heavy with manganese that can discolor appliances and laundry; in high concentrations the mineral can create health concerns for vulnerable populations.
The reservoir project has stalled—mired by a lawsuit, a state law limiting use of eminent domain and other opposition. West Lake was 75 inches below its normal level in recent weeks, the lowest ever recorded, Wheeler said.
“We are now in dire straits due to years of government bureaucracy and political schemes,” said Osceola Mayor Thomas Kedley, who blamed state lawmakers for the gridlock. “And [we] wish only to work towards sincere, nonpartisan solutions.”
Officials are considering building a cofferdam around a riverboat casino in West Lake to keep it buoyed.
Longer-term, officials in the city of 5,500 are entertaining another option: recycling wastewater to augment water supply. An engineering report found the treated effluent—or discharged wastewater—would be of equal or better quality to that in West Lake. It isn’t a new idea—some Western cities have adopted the practice.
But, Wheeler said, “it’s definitely new in Iowa.”
Write to Shannon Najmabadi at shannon.najmabadi@wsj.com