At the release end of the Jordan Lake Dam in Chatham County, an osprey fishes for its dinner. 

The bird spins in the air, dives low over the water, and yanks a fish out with its talons. A heron, watching from the riverbank, squawks jealousy and lunges at the osprey. But with its long legs and giant beak, the heron is too slow and cumbersome compared to the osprey, which soars away with its scaly meal.

The scene plays out in the Haw River as it runs through the concrete hill of the Jordan Lake dam on its way to the sea. The Army Corps of Engineers built the dam in 1974 to flood the valley, holding back about 70 billion gallons of water to form the Triangle’s favorite spot for fishing, boating, and drawing municipal drinking water.

For years, taps in Wake and Chatham counties have sucked from the lake. Now, as the flow of newcomers to the Triangle grows from a trickle to a flood, the City of Durham is about to get thirstier than its current reservoirs can manage. The city, in partnership with Chatham County, Orange County, and the Town of Pittsboro, wants to stick its own straw into Jordan Lake by 2029.

Local water planners hope that—unlike the osprey and the heron—the municipal governments surrounding the lake can cooperate to share its resources. 

It’s the kind of government work that, frankly, doesn’t seem to matter that much until you turn your tap on and nothing comes out. Durham employees say the city isn’t close to that—yet.

“We plan 50 years out,” says Sydney Miller, water resource director for the City of Durham. He says that, without this plan, it would take about 10 years for people to notice some new restrictions on water usage. 

“You’d be getting much more frequent calls from the utility saying we need you to start conserving water,” Miller says, “No more outdoor water. Can’t do any pressure washing. Carwashes? Nope…We need you to cut back on the showers you take, we need you to reduce the number of times you wash laundry.”

The plan, still in initial phases, is to build a water intake on the west side of the lake. That pipeline will flow into a new water treatment plant before being sent through transmission pipelines to join the existing infrastructure for distribution, supplementing Durham’s roughly 28 million gallons per day from Lake Michie and Little River reservoir. 

Planners say that the new intake would not impact Jordan Lake’s current uses as a recreation hub and a water source for other parts of the Triangle.

“One of the tenets of the Triangle Water Partnership is to ensure that—in meeting our own current and future needs for water—we in no way compromise the ability of those communities downstream in meeting their own current and future needs,” Miller says.

That’s a much more neighborly tone than exists out west, where states and native nations are locked in legal disputes over the limited resource.

“We actually have more water available in comparison to our needs,” says Miller. “So we don’t have quite the strain on our resources that they do.”

Local environmental groups aren’t ringing the alarm over this project, but they are cautious about the potential downside of allocating more of the lake’s water supply.

“If we have worse droughts due to climate change, I don’t believe that was factored in,” says Elaine Chiosso, head of local nonprofit Haw River Assembly. “There’s a lot of attention being paid to water conservation, and perhaps this will all work out in the end, but I do worry that not enough attention is [paid] to the impacts of just constantly drawing down water.”

In the droughts in the 2000’s, water levels dipped low enough to reveal some of the submerged roads under the lake. Chiosso says droughts like that, coupled with increased human use, can have negative impacts on wildlife.

 “I think it’s very hard for us as humans to think about the carrying capacity of a landscape for humans,” says Choisso. 

Still, Durham has kept its water usage relatively constant for several decades despite a growing population. That mostly comes from improvements in technology, like toilets and showerheads that use water more efficiently, for which the city offers rebates. 

James Lim, Durham’s water efficiency manager, says that the city started focusing on water management in the 1990s with a pair of bond referenda. And in the 2000s, a pair of droughts got residents thinking about how to conserve water even in non-drought times. 

“If we use less water, that’s the same as buying more water or acquiring more water,” says Lim. “So we really want to encourage people to think about efficiency and conservation as a resource as opposed to making a sacrifice or reducing a standard of living.”

Chiosso says that as North Carolina and its metro areas like Durham grow, lawmakers at the state level need to assume more responsibility in making sure natural resources are protected and managed in ways that are conducive to sustainable growth.

“We need a legislature that’s willing to pass rules that will protect the environment and to fund staffing,” Chiosso says. “There are so many vacant positions in important environmental jobs in the state of North Carolina right now, it’s really kind of shocking.”