With the arrival of September, we are now far enough along in our conservation efforts to have an idea of how much water our community is actually saving. As you may recall, at the end of July TMWA began asking our customers to reduce outdoor water use by 10% to help conserve our upstream drought reserves. As it has in the past, the community has come through. Customer demand is down a total of 10% through the first five weeks of our voluntary conservation campaign (compared to the same five weeks of 2013). Customer demand averaged 98.3 million gallons a day (MGD) last week.

We continue to make supplemental releases of water from Stampede reservoir in order to meet customer demand. Reservoir releases from drought storage in both Stampede and Donner Lake will continue through September and into October when we expect demand to drop to the point where releases from reserves will no longer be needed. Over the last two weeks TMWA has used 1,800 acre-feet, or roughly 7% of our total upstream drought supply, to-date. Flow at the CA/NV state line was approximately 165 cubic feet per second (cfs) this morning.