Last week, Laura Askew, co-owner of Askew Drilling Co. in Jonesboro, scheduled a homeowner who had spent some $25,000 on plantings and is now past the 30-day window allowed for watering professionally installed landscaping. The total outdoor watering ban took the home-owner by surprise.

"He was real upset about it," she said.

With neighbors now routinely squealing on each other for outdoor illegal watering, drilling a well has become a sensitive proposition. Several homeowners who had wells drilled in recent days did not return phone calls or declined to talk on the record. The Grayson homeowner said she didn't want to call attention to her property.

Yet three years into the harshest drought anybody can remember, something new has been added to these timeless rural routines — something that could portend metro Atlanta's worst water-shortage nightmare.

Orme is dry: The mountain spring that has supplied it with water for more than a century has been reduced by the record drought to a virtual trickle.

So every other day, a couple of old trucks haul water all morning and afternoon from a country fire hydrant two miles away in Alabama to the town's rusting 17,500-gallon tank, up a dirt lane near the spring on Orme Mountain.

A group that focuses on election integrity said Wednesday that a mail ballot is not a secure way to conduct a recall election for members of Potrero's planning group.
But Barbara Chamberlain, who heads an election committee for the group promoting the recall, said she's satisfied with the mail ballot for the Dec. 11 election in the backcountry community 45 miles east of San Diego.

The election is seeking to recall five members of the planning group who approved a project by Blackwater Worldwide for a law enforcement and military training camp on 824 acres in Potrero. (The company recently changed its name from Blackwater USA.)

The election has become a referendum of sorts on the project, which has aroused intense controversy because of environmental issues and concerns about Blackwater's role as a government contractor in Iraq.

County Registrar of Voters Deborah Seiler said she decided to conduct the ballot by mail because it is more convenient for Potrero's 505 registered voters. Ballots will be mailed out Nov. 13 and must be returned Dec. 11.