During the summer and fall of 2008 a drought plagued Hall County, Ga. Cookie Palmer, nutrition program director for the Hall County School System, talks about how she tried to make do with a vastly reduced water supply.
A serious drought has plagued Hall County, Ga., since last summer. Cookie Palmer, nutrition program director for the Hall County School System, is trying to reduce the amount of water the department uses in its 34 schools.
“We looked for ways water could be used twice. The biggest change we made was not using hoses to clean floors. Now we use buckets and mops. We, of course, have water in our sinks to wash and sanitize, but at the end of the day that water can be used to clean the floor. When we clean apples, for example, we try to do that so the water can be kept to mop with. Sometimes if we have teacher tea stations there will be a cooler with ice in it and, again, that water is used for some other purpose, usually for cleaning the floors or perhaps it’s put in the hot wells and melted to use for the next day if it’s still clean.
In the past we would just turn the sink on and let it fill up. Now we turn the sink on and when it has enough water to cover whatever we are trying to wash, we stop. We also wash our hands without the water running. It took some getting used to, but now we are trained to turn the water off while we scrub our hands.
The first step was just really making sure our employees were conscientious about water conservation.”