By Alton Mitchell, originally posted on November 9, 2016

The looming drought over LaFayette and Chambers County is getting worse and now local residents will feel the effects first hand. On Monday evening LaFayette City Council members approved measures to help conserve water in the city after closely monitoring the situation with falling water levels.

Two weeks ago council members announced that they were requesting local residents to seek methods to help reduce their consumption of water. At the time those voluntary cutbacks were announced it was announced that the situation was going to be monitored closely and would be updated at further council meetings.

On Monday evening Mayor Barry Moody announced that he and Katie Hill had been watching the situation very closely over the past three weeks and with the situation still growing worse the city is moving into something known as Phase One of water cutbacks now.

Phase one will create mandatory cutbacks in outdoor water usage in LaFayette. Those cutbacks will include limiting the use of watering outdoors such as lawns and washing cars. Katie Hill announced that those cutbacks will not impact business that have a license to operate with water usage such as car washes.

The cutbacks will take effect this Thursday November 10, 2016 and will impact all of LaFayette. The local forecast does not show any significant signs of rain in the near future. The lack of rain means the water cutback measures may be present in LaFayette for a while.