COLUMBIA, S.C. - South Carolina residents have dramatically cut their water use this summer, but rainfall in the region still is not keeping pace with demand, state officials said Tuesday as they declared that about one-fourth of the state is suffering from extreme drought.

The designation does not mean that residents statewide will be required to conserve water, but officials called for more aggressive conservation and some water systems already have implemented restrictions on things such as washing cars and watering lawns.

“People are putting a lot of public pressure on each other to conserve. And so we’ve gotten a great response,” said Sue Schneider, manager of the Spartanburg Water System, where a mix of voluntary and mandatory restrictions have use down 15 percent this summer compared to last summer.

Steve de Kozlowski, chairman of the Drought Response Committee, said local water authorities must manage their water supplies and there will be no state intervention unless public health or resources are threatened.

That means calling for “very aggressive conservation measures — as aggressive as they feel necessary for their own local situation,” he said.

Some leaders of the state’s largest and smallest water systems said conservation efforts already have led to month-to-month usage falling off by as much as nearly a third after voluntary or mandatory restrictions were implemented.

The drought committee added Anderson, Abbeville, Greenwood, Laurens, Union, Newberry, Saluda, Edgefield and McCormick counties to the extreme drought list. They join Cherokee, Greenville, Oconee, Pickens and Spartanburg, which hit the list in June.

The committee called for water systems to encourage aggressive, but voluntary water conservation in the 14-county extreme drought area — a wedge mostly between I-20 and I-26 from the Savannah River on the Georgia state line to the Upstate along the North Carolina line.

Two counties — Charleston and Georgetown — have had enough rain that they’re no longer on the drought list.

The rest of the state is in drought stages ranging from incipient to extreme.

Water systems said they have adequate supplies for months more, but wanted to carefully manage that resource. For instance, Schneider said the Spartanburg system “could easily go months with the current volumes that we have.”

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