Considering that our communities' main concern with fresh water is keeping it from flooding streets, homes and businesses, the water legislation Gov. Mark Sanford signed Wednesday in Rock Hill may strike some readers as strange. The bill in question establishes two river basin advisory commissions in conjunction with North Carolina.

Those who might wonder why such commissions are necessary should cast their minds back to the hot, dry midsummer of 2002, which turned out to be the tail end of a five-year drought that besieged the Southeast. The water level in the Great Pee Dee River had fallen so low that the fresh water supply of the city of Georgetown came under threat.

Salt water was creeping from Winyah Bay toward the city's water intakes. Drinking water was in danger of being disrupted, as was water flow to Georgetown Steel, International Paper and other industries on which Georgetonians depend for jobs.

Only after intensive negotiations with the private interests that control a series of lakes along North Carolina's Yadkin River was enough water released to keep fresh water flowing in the Great Pee Dee, into which the Yadkin flows. In Georgetown and the other S.C. communities that depend on the Great Pee Dee for fresh water, crisis was averted.

The drought, which ended soon after, made clear to S.C. water officials and Sanford that the state needed to emulate its drier counterparts in the Great Plains and the West: to work with its upriver neighbor to ensure that downstream communities receive a fair share of the water.

The need for bistate cooperation is less urgent here than it is, for example, between upriver eastern-slope Colorado and downriver western Kansas. In those parts, dry weather is an annual constant. Here, drought is sporadic.

The legislation Sanford signed Wednesday grew out of the recommendations of his 2003 water law review committee. It establishes advisory commissions for the Yadkin-Great Pee Dee and the Catawba-Wateree river systems, giving the two Carolinas a format for distributing available river water in both states during dry times. Our elected officials deserve credit for reducing chances that the next drought, which will happen someday, is less scary and painful than the one that ended in 2002.