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All things considered, Bethany Town Supervisor Carl Hyde was in fairly good spirits Tuesday evening after making phone calls to Bethany residents for three hours to, as he put it, serve as an early Grinch and rob them of their holiday. 

Those people had been planning on celebrating Thanksgiving at the town’s Community Center because they didn’t have water in their own homes. On Tuesday morning, the Community Center went dry as well. 

As town officials and residents work through a water shortage brought on by drought, all of them have said it has been the worst they have ever seen since living in Bethany, many of them for decades. Fill dates are being scheduled week by week from a tanker that was provided by the state Office of Emergency Management.

Santa came early again for a visit Friday morning in the form of a donation of four pallets of bottled water all ready to be distributed to residents, Supervisor Carl Hyde Jr. said. Operations Manager Eric Santos of Casella Waste Systems had heard about Bethany's plight and showed up with his crew and the much-welcomed donation of water at town hall, Hyde said.

Tuesday afternoon was unexpectedly busy and gleeful for Bethany Town Supervisor Carl Hyde Jr.

And while still being embroiled in town residents’ plight of dry wells and being in need of daily water supplies, he found something to smile about, he says.

“We’re on the list,” he said about the town’s placement on the state’s Water Infrastructure Improvement Award approvals. “My phone’s been ringing off the hook. I heard from Steve Hawley and J.W. Cook from the governor’s office. He called to say congratulations, you got your grant. I’m very happy.”

Water donations kept coming to the Town of Bethany on Saturday, as 18 pallets of bottled drinking water were delivered by Food Link from Wegmans Food Markets and four pallets of drinking water came from Tops Friendly Markets to the town hall. 

Town Supervisor Carl Hyde Jr. has said

Jerry Kujawski had no trouble with Saturday’s rule of first-come, first-served to fill up his 300-gallon water tote. In fact, he made a return trip to fill it up a second time to help out a neighbor, and he was only the third or fourth person who had been at Bethany Town Hall to do so for the two-hour fill-up period.

When it seemed as though there would have been dozens of people clamoring for a go at the pump connected to a tanker of water to shore up their dried-up wells, the parking lot was empty most of the time. 

Town Supervisor Carl Hyde Jr. had put out the notice that anyone with no water could get their totes filled between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Saturday at the town hall, and he and members of the Bethany town board and fire department stood at the tanker ready and waiting.

With so much talk about global warming and climate change, that would seem to be the likely culprit for drought so extreme it has dried up dozens of wells in pockets of Genesee County.

However, Stephen Shaw, associate professor for environmental resources engineering at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, says it might be much more random than that.

Shaw has just completed a 20-year analysis and a report about dry wells across the entire northeast. He found that a drought in 2016 was “pretty intense,” especially across Western New York and Buffalo in particular. That didn’t match what these towns — the volume of households — in Genesee County have experienced, he said.

If you were asked to name the number one cause of lung cancer among non-smokers, it may surprise you that the answer is not second hand smoke, often portrayed as perhaps the most dangerous substance to lungs for those exposed to the fumes of others.