Palmerton residents have been asked to conserve water in light of the recent weather conditions.

Councilman Michael Ballard announced at Thursday’s borough council meeting that the Palmerton Borough Water Department has asked residents to voluntarily conserve water.

Ballard said this may include turning off the faucet while brushing teeth, taking shorter showers, placing a bucket in the shower to catch water while the shower water adjusts to temperature, using a broom instead of a hose to clean driveway steps and sidewalks, limit or avoid watering lawns or gardens and limit or avoid washing vehicles and equipment if possible.

“This is not a drought emergency declaration,” Ballard said.

After the meeting, borough assistant secretary Kim Rodrigues said the water table is lower than normal.

“We just noticed that the water table is lower than we’ve seen it in a long time,” Rodrigues said. “It’s not mandatory; we’re just asking people to start thinking about it.”

For more information on water conservation, visit palmertonborough.com.

John Feerick, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather, acknowledged Friday that July has been an extremely dry month.

“It’s definitely been dry here in July and really dating back to June, it’s been relatively dry across the region,” Feerick said. “We’ve had so far in July basically give or take about 2 inches of rain; in general the whole area from the Lehigh Valley up into the Poconos has been about 50% of the normal rainfall so far this month.

“You would normally expect about 4 inches of rain this month. June was certainly dry as well, but not as dry as July. We’ve had generally about 70% of the (expected) normal rainfall since June.”

Feerick said that while April and May were fairly wet, there’s no need to fret as it appears to be a short-term thing.

“If this was to last a lot longer, we could obviously run into a lot of problems,” he said. “Hopefully we can get some rain over the next few weeks.”

Feerick said that while there were some showers on Friday and the humidity level came down some, it looks like a warm dry weekend with plenty of sunshine and temperatures generally in the low to mid-80s Saturday and Sunday.

He said the humidity is expected to come back Monday and Tuesday, with possibly a cold front Tuesday afternoon that could produce some showers.

“Not looking like a big rainstorm or drought buster by any means,” Feerick said. “No real big rainstorms on the horizon through next week; looking like more of your pop up thunderstorms.”

Feerick said it will be dry this weekend and on Monday, with the chance of thunderstorms on Tuesday.

“It’s a short-term problem, hopefully,” he said.

Efforts to reach the state Department of Environmental Protection for comment Friday afternoon were unsuccessful.

A map on DEP’s website does not indicate any drought concerns.