But in the midst of what may be the worst drought ever in North Carolina, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are watering the synthetic turfs used by their field hockey teams.
The International Hockey Federation insists.
The universities are not breaking any rules. But like clockwork, as residents in Durham and Chapel Hill see their plants and lawns wither, the sprinklers go on at the UNC-CH Francis E. Henry Stadium and at Duke’s Williams Field.
Brad Schnurr, a Chapel Hill contractor who does work in Durham, saw the sprinklers go on one afternoon recently at Duke and drove around the block to make sure he was not seeing things.
“Sprinklers aren’t even the right term, they’re like fire hoses,” Schnurr said. “I was like, ‘What is that? What is that?’ I couldn’t believe it.”
In spite of the fact that we’re in a desert and are continually short of water–and have many stretches of severe drought–the golf courses are continually watered in southern Utah. It’s important to keep the tourists coming in!
We’re constantly reminded that we need to conserve water, yet I have a neighbor who DAILY uses a high pressure hose to spray off his driveway and his garage floor and to clean out the gutter in front of his house. DAILY. Some people will just never get it.
I was watching a show on Discovery channel about water conservation efforts in (I think it was) Lost Wages. It is almost illegal to water a lawn anymore, and special cops patrol looking for people who don’t obey strict watering curfews. Perhaps Utah needs to take note.
The population of southern Utah is booming, and the need for water is too, but there’s only so much. Now a couple of small cities in so. Utah want to build a pipeline from the Colorado River to supply their water. It’s been pointed out to them that they annually use twice as much water per person than cities such as Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona, where they’ve learned to conserve and maybe they should consider cutting back first. It falls on deaf ears. They want to keep using as much as they do–planting huge lawns and gardens more appropriate to a climate that gets more rainfall. I think something drastic will have to happen here before they get truly serious about it.
Yawn It’s been like this all my life in the town I live in.
But just wait until after the rainy season this year. They’re predicting that our reservoir will silt in completely because our entire watershed burned up in a fire over the summer (and there’s another one burning right now).
But yeah, watering plastic grass is a serious WTF moment.
