{"id":640612,"date":"2026-08-16T19:39:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T19:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/640612\/"},"modified":"2026-08-16T19:39:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T19:39:18","slug":"this-summer-isnt-as-bad-as-the-drought-of-1976","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/640612\/","title":{"rendered":"This summer isn\u2019t as bad as the drought of 1976"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cFor the public, the restrictions in 1976 were far more severe,\u201d says Laura Baker, an expert at Reading University.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t imagine how people would react to those sorts of things today \u2013 I don\u2019t think it would go down very well.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhereas my impression is that in the \u201970s. everyone just kind of got on with it. They helped their neighbours by bringing buckets of water if they couldn\u2019t walk very far and things like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fast forward 50 years and much has changed.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the 1976 drought<\/a>, the Government added links between the water networks, built a better network for monitoring river and groundwater levels and expanded the country\u2019s storage capacity.<\/p>\n

Between 1976 and 1992, about a dozen reservoirs were constructed, including Colliford Reservoir in Cornwall, Roadford Reservoir in Devon and Kielder Water in Northumberland.<\/p>\n

At the same time, however, demand for water<\/a> continued to grow as people\u2019s habits changed.<\/p>\n

We now wash more often and use more water to tend our gardens, while more of us own appliances such as washing machines and dishwashers.<\/p>\n

That has caused the average daily amount of water consumed per person to surge from around 80 litres to more than 130 litres.<\/p>\n

The national population has also increased by about a quarter after spikes in migration.<\/p>\n

From these figures, you might think the country would be in worse shape this time round. But compared with 1976, the water network<\/a> of today is still faring relatively well, despite temperatures almost hitting 40C.<\/p>\n

Hosepipe bans have been put in place and reservoir levels are below the average for this time of year but do not look concerning, say experts, while rainfall across England in the 12 months to the end of July was above average, at 887mm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cFor the public, the restrictions in 1976 were far more severe,\u201d says Laura Baker, an expert at Reading…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640613,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[269],"tags":[79,442,19559,179,18,440,4799,19,17,133,1702,46523,246056],"class_list":["post-640612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-business","tag-climate-change","tag-drought","tag-economy","tag-eire","tag-environment","tag-global-warming","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-standard","tag-top-story","tag-water-and-sanitation"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117106885723063941","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}