Conor O'Clery visits a village in upstate New York which, like many other places, is coping with the emergency caused by the driest autumn and winter on record.
A terrible water shortage is crippling a little New England town. In a mad attempt to regulate water consumption, the mayor outlaws the use of private toilets. The citizenry is told it must go to public, pay-for-use amenities. Anyone who refuses suffers a terrible fate.
This is the unlikely plot of a current Broadway hit comedy called Urinetown, but life is imitating art in many parts of the north-eastern United States, at least as far as terrible water shortages are concerned.
Take, for example, Goshen, population 5,676, a picturesque 19th-century village dominated by the clock tower of the First Presbyterian Church and boasting America's oldest trotting and pacing racetrack, located 60 miles upstate from New York City. Built on bedrock, it is one of hundreds of American habitations that are running dry because of the worst drought in living memory.
Here's how bad it is in Goshen. The village reservoir goes down 146 inches and it is today down 110 inches. As Goshen uses approximately one inch, or 600,000 gallons, a day at this time of year, the reservoir has only 36 days' water supply left.
"We've has nothing like this in 250 years," said Goshen's mayor, Mrs Marcia Mattheus, in her office in the Village Hall, a graceful mansion built in 1815 which once served as the National Bank of Orange County.
"Never has there been so little rain. There was no rain in the fall, and this winter, when we normally get 40 inches of snow, we had only eight inches.
"If the drought continues and there is no rainy season this spring, this village of Goshen, like every other municipality, will have an insurmountable problem," said Mrs Mattheus, a former teacher and community activist.
After the driest autumn and winter on record in seven states, and the second most arid February across the whole of the US since records began in 1895, thousands of wells and rivers have run dry, and the Federal Government has declared severe to extreme drought conditions from Maine to Georgia.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a drought emergency for the city on March 26th, the first since 1989, requiring businesses to reduce water consumption by 15 per cent and shutting down ornamental fountains and banning private car-washing. The city's reservoirs should be 92 per cent full but instead are half-empty.
While the use of private lavatories may not be banned, as in Urinetown, the volume of flush toilets in the US has long been strictly regulated to preserve water. Before 1990 toilets on average drew six gallons of water per flush. Since 1992 a national standard has limited flushes to 1.6 gallons.
Every litle helps. In Goshen, the mayor said, restaurants do not offer the customary glass of water except on request. Watering of gardens is forbidden, and anyone who breaks the rule is at least "yelled at by neighbours" and subject to a $250 fine.
Cars may not be washed in driveways, though Bob Boyle of Goshen Car and Truck Wash uses untreated water from a private well and his sign proclaims: "We are on well water".
Swimming pools may not be filled, unless householders want to pay $400 per 6,000 gallon truck-load for water brought in from outside.
Local people resort to individual measures to guarantee their own supplies. The mayor's husband, Mr Geerd Matteus, who makes sets for Broadway plays, has rigged up piping to channel rainwater from the gutters of their home and collect it in giant drums for storage.
Many municipalities like Goshen are confronted with the lack of foresight, and sheer thoughtlessness, of previous generations. The first reservoir in the village was gouged out on top of a hill, and the rain water it supplied was intermittent and seasonal.
Thirty years ago, to cope with a growing population, a back-up reservoir was built, this time above a huge rock fissure through which the water drained away.
Last year the village installed a pump to capture the leaking water from the back-up reservoir. It worked wonders, for a while. "At end of July our reservoir was full to the brim for the first time in modern history," said the mayor.
"Imagine how proud I was. But God has mysterious ways of keeping you humble. Then came the worst drought in history", and the back-up reservoir totally dried up.
Then came more bad news. For many years Goshen, which needs a million gallons of water a day in summer, supplemented its supply by paying the neighbouring village of Florida for limited access to its 640-acre lake. But, worried by its own shrinking water supply, Florida is cutting this off.
This could have been an absolute disaster for Goshen, but as Mrs Mattheus remarked, nature can also give a "backhanded favour". Since becoming mayor three years ago she has negotiated with neighbouring municipalities for permission to look for promising well locations outside the village boundaries, and she consulted every old farmer in the area about where water might be found.
Many drillings were made on the advice of hydrographers, "educated guessers" as she calls them, only to end in failure.
But the eighth well, dug three months ago, proved to be a "gusher" capable of spewing out about 350,000 gallons a day.
Now the race is on to get the well hooked up to the village system before the last inch of water is drained from the Goshen reservoir. The mayor took me out to the site where a specialist team from Wisconsin was toiling in unseasonably hot sunshine - there wasn't a cloud in the sky - to lay high-density plastic pipes 17,000 feet from the well to the village system at a cost of over half a million dollars.
The well is so important that villagers come by to check how the pipeline is going. Work should be completed in three weeks, said the mayor, who has stopped watching the Weather Channel because the precipitation it promised so often did not come.
She and Michael Muzzoloese, head of the department of public works, haven't been able to sleep for two months worrying about water, she said.
"I don't think we are prepared for this kind of god-forbid situation," she added. "We found a wonderful amount of water but the drought is so severe it is not enough. There will come a point - and it won't just be my village - where we will have to look to county and state for help.
She hopes for some rain in April, which is normally the wettest month, to start filling the reservoir. "No one is going dry here," she said defiantly.