A drought means that the normal amount of water needed for normal activities in an area has not fallen. For that reason, one or several of the four major areas effected by drought are effected. These areas are characterized as:

Meteorological - a measure of departure of precipitation from normal. Due to climatic
differences what is considered a drought in one location may not be a
drought in another location.
Agricultural - refers to a situation when the amount of moisture in the soil no longer meets the needs of a particular crop.
Hydrological - occurs when surface and subsurface water supplies are below normal.
Socioeconomic- refers to the situation that occurs when physical water shortage begins to affect people.

Each of the above areas can be impacted either independently or jointly by a lack of rainfall. Failure of several of these factors has been shown to cause great civilizations to fall, and for that reason droughts are serious matters. Consider Ethiopia and Somalia in the 1980’s and 1990’s , and one can easily understand the profound impacts droughts can have on regions, nations, and continents.

If you are interested in looking at the normal precipitation pattern for central Oneida County
please click here.

Due to the geologic features which under lay Oneida County, and the trend of housing developments to build higher on hillsides for the view, it can be expected that individual households on hillsides and tops will be among the first to suffer from a lack of water. Experience has shown that those with shallow dug wells and springs are usually among the first to run out of water.

Over 70% of Oneida County’s population gets its drinking water from community public water supplies. The Oneida County Department of Health works with local suppliers of water monitoring the effects of droughts on water systems in the different parts of the county.

In 1997 the Oneida County Health Department made a detailed assessment of community water supplies in Oneida County and developed a written water supply emergency plan to deal with water outages, and what measures could be taken to supply water to various communities
in the event of outages.

The Oneida County Health Department has been working in partnership with your local water suppliers in finding better, less easily depleatable supplies of waters.

If a drought is impacting a region of New York State, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has a drought warning system and a calculated response plan to minimize the impacts of a drought on the State’s residents. If you are interested in learning more about the drought warnings and declarations and what they mean click here.


The best thing you can do is to use water wisely. If you are interested in water conservation tips, and water do’s and don’ts please click here.

This department has received several phone calls in the past, mostly from people in the hilly areas of Deerfield, Paris and Floyd, with regards to water outages. Due to the heights involved, and the underlying geology, it is not very probable that the drilling of additional wells in many cases
will yield additional water.

• One option is strict water conservation guidelines. Samples of these guidelines were collected nationwide and are enclosed for your information. This will have only limited effectiveness in a severe drought situation.
  
• Another option is to drill a new and possibly deeper well. As we noted, this might not always work, and can be expensive. (the cost of drilling is approximately $20.00 per linear foot depth of a well along with a setup fee. Well drillers usually can offer no guarantee that water will be found. Estimate the cost to be somewhere in the $2,000 range for most drilled wells.)
  
• If you are looking for information on well drillers click here.
  
• Another option is for the homeowner to purchase a large water plastic water tank such as sold by agricultural supply stores. For information on where to find these tanks please click here. Such a tank must be either American Water Works Association (AWWA) approved, or Federal Department of Agriculture (FDA) approved for food or water service. This ensures the tank is of a quality for human food or water service use. The home owner would then contract with a water hauler, operating under a New York State Department of Health Bulk and Bottled Water Permit (Section 5-6 of 10 New York Codes Rules and Regulations). In 1995 the former Utica Board of Water Supply sold water to tanker trucks operators at $1.65/ 1000 gallons of water. The greatest cost involved is in the transport of the water by a New York State Certified Bulk Water Hauler.
  For a listing of bulk water haulers please click here.

• Use of camping showers (available at sporting goods stores) and large hand carried water containers could, also be used in an outage. It is necessary that a suitable source of safe drinking water be available. Town Barns, Highway Garages, Municipal Buildings and County Facilities which are connected to systems Public Water Supplies regulated by the Department of Health would need to be made available with accessible spigots for the public to use. We recommend you contact your town representatives on this matter.

Many persons have heard of the 100 year flood. This is a flood which experts estimate will occur once in 100 years. Similarly, droughts happen periodically and to different levels of severity.
For this reason no one can predict when a drought will end.

However, history has shown that often droughts are broken by heavy rains and floods. These rains and floods are referred to as "drought breaking events". These flooding storms pose their own threat to water quality, and if you would like to learn more about why these are a
problem please click here.

Experience has shown that water quality in both droughts and floods can be significantly impacted. For an explanation why click here. It is the recommendation of the Oneida County Health Department that every well or spring should be tested for bacteriological contamination at least once a year. If you are interested in learning where you can
get your water tested please click here.

If you find that your well has coliform or e. coli bacteria, you will need to disinfect the well. If you are interested in the procedure to follow to disinfect your well, please click here.

If you need to learn more about what it means if you have total coliform or ecoli bacteria in
your well, please click  here.

For looking at this question, there are three (3) main drought categories:

http://www.drought.unl.edu 

http://www.dec.state.ny.us/website/dow/current.html

http://www.drought.noaa.gov

For local weather try these links:

http://wktv.linkjam.com/weather.phtml

WUTR

http://www.wutr20.com/cgi-bin/calendar/calendar.pl?dept=weather

(315) 798-5064