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PLEASANT GROVE, Utah (AP) -- While homeowners throughout Utah have been repeatedly urged -- sometimes under threat of law -- to water at night to avoid evaporation loss, Pleasant Grove officials want some residents to water during the daytime.
Because the city has no storage system for its pressurized irrigation water, water that is not immediately used cannot be saved, said city administrator Frank Mills.
About 500 homes in Pleasant Grove are connected to the pressurized irrigation system. The city is asking those people to use the system during the day.
The city's large water users "are using the water at night and the residential users will have better water pressure and save us water if they will use the secondary water during the daytime," the newsletter stated.
With Gov. Mike Leavitt and others asking residents statewide to conserve water by watering only at night, Pleasant Grove residents were doing the same, creating a great demand for water at night while the flows during the day were essentially wasted, Mills said.
"We don't have a storage reservoir built yet, so the delivery pipe is the storage system," he said. "What's been happening is that everybody has been doing what they have been asked to do and they are watering at night and we were drawing the water down so fast out of the pipes that in some places we were losing water pressure and were not able to give people adequate pressure to water with."
The city hopes to build a storage pond next year if it can get a state grant.
(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
