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Bessemer City Down to 13 Days of Water

By: Kristen Hampton

Despite all the recent rain, a Gaston County town is on drought alert tonight.

Bessemer City's water supply is down to thirteen days and counting, before they go upstream to purchase water from another town.

That cost puts a kink in the city coffers.

Unless Bessemer city gets rain all day, every day for the next 13 days, the city will run out of water.

They will have to then purchase it from Kings Mountain at a cost of $2.34 per 1000 gallons. At first glance, that looks like a nominal cost until you consider the city uses 1,500,000 gallons a day.

So who is drinking up all that water?

The Dole plant uses half a million gallons a day. The lithium plant uses 300,000. The other half million gallons goes to the townspeople where it goes down the drain or down the toilet. Any way you look at it, it's going down.

And, there's just not much rainy weather to fill it back up.

"They don't appear to be as bad but they are a little worse than the same time last year," Bessemer City Manager Allen Faris said, "We got two weeks left now and then we'll be going back to Kings Mountain to purchase water again."

Faris is keeping one eye on the water level and the other on the bottom line. "We got through the drought last year and spent something like $200,000. We absorbed that, but realistically this money has to come from somewhere, and we're supported by taxpayers, and we're supported by taxes, so it has to come from somewhere," he said.

Bessemer City officials say the extra cost of buying water pulls money from projects like fixing broken water pipes and system maintenance.

We checked with the North Carolina Drought Management Council and Gaston County is still in an extreme drought.