NEW YORK On the Rocks

New York City, sweating out the most serious water shortage in a century, was chided by Interior Secretary Stewart Udall last week for being "obviously laggard" in meeting the crisis. With all its reservoirs on the rocks, it was clearly too late to rush out and build new ones; in any case, there was no prospect of rain to fill them. Instead, the city reacted with a characteristic blend of hoopla, voodoo and Micawberism.

The Water Supply, Gas and Electricity Department churned out stickers admonishing: DON'T BE A DRIP -SAVE EVERY DROP. To save as many drops as possible, the city began enforcing stringent -and widely ignored -restrictions on the use of central air conditioning in offices and apartments. Though 110 inspectors fanned out to enforce the curb, the city issued a summons to only one offender -the landlord of the local FBI office. The Water Department nabbed another kind of offender: the Parks Department, which was caught wet-handed sprinkling golf greens in dead of night.

A newspaper offered $100 prizes for water-saving ideas and got some good ones (first winner: don't rinse empty milk bottles). City hall was bombarded with suggestions, among them a proposal to ban shaving and a surefire formula for rain: hang a freshly killed snake in a tree. Mayor Robert Wagner became enthusiastic over the possibilities of rainmaking after reading a newspaper story about a new electronic device that was said to have dumped torrents on parched Escondido, Calif. As it turned out, Escondido had received less rainfall than New York -half an inch since July 1. Undaunted, a Wagnerian team flew posthaste to California to investigate the invention.

Parishioners of Harlem's Fountain Springs Baptist Church invoked an older response to drought. Three times a day, their pastor instructed them, they were all to pray for rain. A less idealistic proposal was offered by Congressman William F. Ryan, a candidate for the Democratic mayoral nomination, who says Wagner should fire his Water Supply Commissioner for not fixing leaks in water mains. Just for emphasis, Ryan rolled up his pants and waded through one gusher in Central Park -he even drank some of the water -but the department said it was nature's water, not the city's.

The Administration, meanwhile, declared the hardest-hit sections of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware a disaster area, making them eligible for immediate federal aid -mostly in the form of well-digging and construction of new pumping and pipeline facilities. Northern New Jersey, which had been expected to fun out of water in mid-November, and New York City, which faced the same fate in February, thus won a reprieve in which to devise new conservation methods, tap new water sources and pray.

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