Drought may be over, but rain deficit lingers.
The drought that plagued west Georgia last year, and which threatened to drain Villa Rica’s reservoirs dry, officially ended last month — but its effects are still being felt, and despite the wet summer the area is still in a rainfall deficit.
Douglas County endured 43 weeks of dry weather.
"Although we have improved and are largely considered ‘recovered’ we have not quite made up for the entirety of the deficit over that large period of time," said Laura Belanger, a meteorologist for the Weather Service in Peachtree City.
In Villa Rica, city officials watched nervously as the water levels fell in the city’s three reservoirs, and briefly considered issuing even tougher water restrictions than had been imposed by the state.
According to information provided by the Weather Service, the dry spring of 2016 led to rapidly degrading conditions through the summer and fall months.
Northwest Georgia counties were the first to be included in the "severe drought" zone, and in September, Douglas and Carroll counties were included in a list of several counties experiencing "exceptional drought."
But in November, the state escalated the response to "Level 2," which restricted outdoor watering and other water uses.
Villa Rica, however, considered going further and getting permission from the state to declare a Level 3 response, a level that would ban all landscape irrigation and limit the watering of outdoor gardening to only a six-hour window per day.
Eventually, the city imposed new water rates as a first measure, required by the state, to independently raise the city’s response to Level 3, but the idea of upgrading to Level 3 quietly died when wetter weather appeared in late December.