Vancouver Ups Water Restriction, Starts Fining People for Watering Lawns

Metro Vancouver's water struggle worsened this week, and they've tightened their water restrictions, as the reservoir water storage continues to drop during one of the worst droughts the region has experienced.

Metro Vancouver's three reservoirs, which were, on average, 100 percent full in May, are down to a new low of 69 percent. And the levels continue to drop.

On July 20, the region was put under Stage 3 water restrictions. Stage 3 is the second highest restriction for drinking water, which prohibits watering lawns, washing cars, and running public watering fountains. Other places such as pools and spas remain under special restrictions.

Last week, the city also raised their drought level to the highest category, Level 4, which describes "extremely dry conditions."

As the city starts to move into more serious conditions, they are also starting to crack down on violators of the water prohibitions. Vancouver city has handed out almost 1,500 warnings and issued 30 tickets at $250 each to anyone who has violated the water restrictions.

Metro Vancouver said that the last time they implemented the second stage of the water shortage response plan was in 2003 during an unusually hot and dry summer.

Metro Vancouver Board Chair and Port Coquitlam mayor Greg Moore told VICE that this year has been extreme for the region, and although they are cracking down on violations, their main goal is to educate people. The message that officials are trying to send to people in the region is that "we're all in this together and we all have to work to reducing our water right now."

"Here in metro Vancouver, we've had little to no rain for May, June, now into July and when we work with environment Canada there's little precipitation forecast for the next two and a half, three months actually," Moore told VICE. "Normally we would be at 69 percent at the end of august so the fact that we're there now is a concern for us and that's why we moved to a stage 3."

"When we were in Stage 1 we were consuming about 1.6 billion liters of water a day, which is quite high, Stage 2 brought it down to about 1.4 billion liters," he said. "But we need to get to less than 1.2 billion liters of water a day for us to stay at Stage 3 and not go to a Stage 4."

Due to this drought, British Columbia has also seen massive amounts of wild fires, and the province could set a new record for how many hectares have burned so far this season. Earlier this month, Motherboard reported on the fact that the wettest place in North America—Vancouver Island's rainforest—was burning, explaining that these dangerous dry seasons might become the new norm.

VICE also spoke to BC's chief fire information officer, Kevin Skrepnek, about what he's seen.

"It's been a fairly hot and dry year so far. We had an early start to the season had some major fires in early may," Skrepnek told VICE. "We didn't see nearly the amount of precipitation in the spring that we usually would have."

Many fires have been caused by lightning, and with the lack of rain, the areas are more susceptible to fire than normal. Since April, he explained that there has been around 1,300 fires and that 250 are burning today.

"In 2014, by the end of season, we had burned about 360,000 hectares, which was the third worst on record. We're currently at 295,000 and we still have probably at least six weeks," he said.

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