Some residents of the B.C. Interior have been banned from watering their lawns amid rising temperatures and an ongoing drought.
On Tuesday, the Thompson-Nicola Regional District and Cook’s Ferry Indian Band issued a mandatory water conservation notice for residents who use the Spences Bridge Community Water Systems in the central Interior.
The ban means residents must immediately stop using sprinklers for outdoor watering, though hand watering of vegetable gardens is still allowed.
The notice comes as water usage exceeds production capacity, resulting in the depletion of the wells, the notice says.
The regional district also says the notice is unrelated to nearby wildfires, which have prompted an evacuation alert for part of the Cook’s Ferry Indian Band reserve lands.
Other parts of B.C., including regions on Vancouver Island and in the Kootenays, have also implemented water conservation efforts as drought and warm weather conditions persist throughout the province.
They include the city of Cranbrook in the Kootenays, where Mayor Wayne Price says residents are becoming accustomed to having a brown lawn following water conservation efforts put into place earlier this year.
“They’re buying into this and the consumption [of water] is down considerably,” Price said of his community.
For more than a week, daytime highs in B.C.’s Interior have sat above 30 C, with several daily temperature records being broken in July.
On Tuesday, heat warnings were issued or maintained for many parts of the southern Interior including the Fraser Canyon, Okanagan Valley, Williams Lake, Kootenay Lake, Cranbrook, as well as the Whistler and Howe Sound regions in the Lower Mainland.
In the north, warnings were also issued for the Cariboo region including Quesnel. Prince George in north-central B.C., the Peace River and Fort Nelson areas in the northeast and inland sections of the North Coast are also under a heat warning.
Daytime highs will be in the 30s, the warning says, with overnight lows in the mid teens.