I've stayed in places where water was only available in homes for a few hours a day, but this is happening in a town in the United States.

By Matthew Bigg
Reuters

ORME, Tennessee - A small town tucked away in the mountains of southern Tennessee is getting by on just a few hours of water a day because its spring has run dry in the drought sweeping the Southeast.

The worst drought to hit the region in decades prompted Georgia to impose water-use restrictions including a ban on outdoor residential watering.

It has also sparked a political battle between Georgia, Alabama and Florida over how to share water from north Georgia's Lake Lanier, which serves cities such as Atlanta as well as industries and a nuclear power plant.

But rural Orme with its population of just 140 people has become a symbol of the drought because few other places appear to have been so directly hit.

Each evening, residents wait for Mayor Tony Reames to make the short drive from his home where he keeps chickens up to a water tower on a wooded hill above the town to open a valve.

When the water is flowing families can fill buckets and water jars, do laundry, take showers and wash dishes before the faucets run dry and they wait for the next evening.

Resident Julie Hoover described Orme as a "hideaway" and a "piece of heaven" because it was safe and everyone knew each other but she said the water shortage had created serious problems.

"People don't like change and they don't like losing their water," said Hoover, who started filling up buckets with water draining from an air-conditioner to get water to flush toilets when the spring ran dry in August.

Hoover and her sisters have also taken to cooking one big family meal for all their children to save water, something she said had proved a blessing.

Sporadic water supply is the norm for much of the world's population but for Orme, near the border of Alabama and Georgia, help is at hand. Local businesses and churches donate bottled water, bringing it to the town's one-room fire house for residents to collect.

Orme received a $377,590 grant from the Department of Agriculture plus a further grant of $229,000 to build a water pipe from Bridgeport, Alabama, to the town's water tower, Reames said.

Workmen laying down sections of the bright blue pipe beneath the side of a road leading to the town move closer each day.