BRITAIN is facing its worst drought for 75 years after one of the driest Januaries on record.

Scientists say that it will be worse than the great drought of 1976 when standpipes were introduced in some areas. Most of England and Wales has had less than half the normal rainfall so far this month, after 15 months of meagre rains in southern and eastern regions.

Only two months since October 2004 have had above-average rainfall in the South East. Several rivers are approaching their lowest ever flows and groundwater levels in Southeast England are so low that several boreholes are near or at their lowest recorded level.

The Environment Agency said: “We are very concerned about the impact of drought in Sussex and Kent next summer.”

The dry conditions are set to continue over the next few days because high pressure is expected to dominate Britain, deflecting wet weather from the Atlantic.

Water companies are already coping with the worst drought since 1976 in the South East. Rivers in the region are running below half their normal levels for January, and reservoir levels are below 40 per cent of capacity.

Last Wednesday the Environment Agency granted Southern Water an emergency drought permit so that water can be drawn from the Medway to boost levels in the Bewl reservoir, Kent. It is currently a third full, its lowest since it was built in 1976. Nearly 20 billion litres of water would be needed to refill it for the summer.

There is a horrible sense of déjà vu about this drought. In 1975-76 England and Wales were scorched during the driest 16-month period on record.

A hot, dry summer in 1975 was followed by a parched winter and spring that turned soil to dust. That set the stage for a record-breaking heatwave in June and July, when the temperature exceeded 32C (90F) for 15 consecutive days.

Rivers, reservoirs and aquifers dwindled and at Teddington, where the River Thames running downstream meets the tidal Thames running upstream, water levels fell to an all-time low.

Widespread hosepipe bans were enforced, a Minister for Drought was appointed and eventually some communities were reduced to using emergency standpipes.

The desert-like conditions were caused by a series of high-pressure systems. These are known as “blocking highs” because they get stuck in one area and bounce off wet depressions coming in off the Atlantic.

This winter we are experiencing a similar pattern of blocking highs, which have deflected rains far to the south across North Africa and even drenched Libya last week.

The risk of drought this year could even be worse than in 1976. Terry Marsh, a hydrologist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology at Wallingford, Oxfordshire, believes that the current drought began more than two years ago in parts of the South East and that the dry winters have been the crucial factor. “We haven’t seen two successive very dry winters for 75 years,” he said.

“The winters over 1933-34 were notably dry but the water demand now is far higher and that puts resources under far more stress.”

Winter rains are the key to many of Britain’s droughts because they replenish the surface reservoirs and underground water supplies, especially in southern and eastern regions — 70 per cent of the South East’s water comes from wells and boreholes drilled into rock. It would take an exceptionally wet year to recover from this sort of drought.

But is this a sign of climate change? Two dry winters in succession cropped up in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as well as 1933-34, so the recent drought is probably part of natural climate variability.

In fact, winters in Britain are predicted to become wetter, not drier, with global warming.

London is one of the driest capital cities in the world, with rainfall similar to Barcelona and available water per head equivalent to that in Israel.

SUMMER OF 76

• Reservoirs emptied and temperatures soared into the nineties. Denis Howell was appointed minister in charge of drought co-ordination
  
  
• Bricks were to be put in lavatory cisterns, dish water used to flush lavatories, and baths were to be less than 5in deep — and even shared
  
  
• Homes in Wales and the West of England were without tap water for much of the day. Yorkshire and East Anglia relied on standpipes in the street
  
  
• Hospital admissions soared, with many people suffering from sunstroke, heart attacks and asthma
  
  
• Gardeners were forbidden to use hosepipes — van patrols enforced the ban Housewives in Surrey forced a golf club to turn off its water sprinklers by keeping a constant vigil. When rain stopped play at Lords for a quarter of an hour, the crowd cheered
  
  
• Fires in the New Forest and other areas in the South of England were left to burn
  
  
• Heavy rain ended the drought in October, but Mr Howell insisted that restrictions had to continue until reservoir levels were back to normal

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