Not a drop to drink

The University students who started the buzz were trying to educate their peers about the seriousness of the drought that tightened its stranglehold on central Virginia in August. But when they posted fliers that warned the water shortage could force the University to close early this semester, a full-fledged rumor was born.

The University soon issued a news release, informing students that they would in fact have to take final exams. There were no plans to send them home early for winter break.

“We wanted to nip that in the bud,” University spokesman Louise Dudley said. “Students shouldn’t be thinking they didn’t have to do their work or that it didn’t matter how much water they tried to save because they were just going to go home anyway.”

Cars went unwashed and lawns browned across the area after the region’s reservoir system dropped to a low of 53.1 percent, or an estimated 89-day supply at the rate people were using water. By mid-November, thanks to conservation, cooler temperatures and rainfall, the reservoir level had crept beyond 85 percent.

Some Lawn residents did their part to limit water use by promoting a Share a Shower With a Tree campaign; they collected their shower water in buckets and used it to water plants.

Such projects helped put a human face on a region-wide problem that had been building for years. The University, which established a task force to monitor the problem in 1999, made a host of minor and major changes. It cut its water use 38 percent from mid-August to late October — installing water-conserving washers in dorms and adding more than 50 portable toilets at football games, for example — continuing a five-year trend of decreasing consumption that has progressed even as the University has increased in size.

“To cut usage in a big place like this, that includes a hospital and laboratories that are dependent on water and 6,000 people in residence, I think that’s quite good,” Dudley said.