By Gemma Q. Casas
Variety News Staff

SOME aquifers on Saipan are drying up, causing some water wells and areas to experience water shortages.
Commonwealth Utilities Corp. spokeswoman Pamela Mathis said they are expecting a drought to hit the CNMI within the next six months and people are urged to conserve water as much as they can.
“Aquifers are drying up in Santa Lourdes, Papago and Capital Hill. We’re expecting a water shortage,” she said in a phone interview.
“Drought is a community issue but many don’t really take it seriously.”
Residents in Gualo Rai have been complaining about the water shortage in their village since last week.
CUC’s trouble hotline said few water wells are functioning in the area.
According to the Pacific El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, Center, the drought will also affect other islands in the region like Palau, Guam, the Marshalls, Hawaii, the Federated States of Micronesia and American Samoa.
Palau had already formed an El Niño Task Force in anticipation of a drought.
Mathis said the National Weather Service has informed CUC that the islands’ rainfall during the first half of the year will be below normal — at most, less than 50 percent of its regular rainfall.
“All over the Pacific, islands are being forewarned to take extra precaution,” said Mathis.
With the closure of the U.S. Geological Service office on Saipan last year, there hasn’t been regular water measurement in the Northern Marianas.
Mathis said one of the major goals of the yet to be formed El Niño Task Force in the CNMI is to measure on a daily or weekly basis the amount of rainfall that comes in so that people will be alerted to the need to conserve water.
“Conservation will be a key element here,” she said.
According to the latest ENSO bulletin, El Niño conditions will persist in the Pacific for the next three to six months.
“For all of 2006, the rainfall throughout Micronesia was near normal in most locations….with few extreme events of rainfall and no destructive typhoons experienced by any island. The anticipated eastward shift of tropical cyclone activity in the fall of 2006 did not materialize. Instead, several typhoons formed to the west of Guam and had enormous impacts to the Philippines,” the ENSO report stated.
“Most islands are expected to receive 60 to 70 percent of the rainfall they normally get during the first six months of 2007. However, month-to-month variations in rainfall patterns (which are unpredictable) may cause an island to experience less than half of the normal rainfall during any one or two of the months from January through June of 2007,” it added.
ENSO reported that by the end of Sept. 2006, the sea surface temperatures of the waters in the equatorial Pacific had warmed.