Posted on 10/20/2007 9:00:08 AM PDT by blam
Georgia Seeks Water Disaster Declaration
Saturday October 20, 2007 4:46 PM
By GREG BLUESTEIN
Associated Press Writer
CUMMING, Ga. (AP) - With water supplies rapidly shrinking during a drought of historic proportions, Gov. Sonny Perdue declared a state of emergency Saturday for the northern third of Georgia and asked President Bush to declare it a major disaster area.
Georgia officials warn that Lake Lanier, a 38,000-acre reservoir that supplies more than 3 million residents with water, is less than three months from depletion. Smaller reservoirs are dropping even lower.
Perdue asked the president to exempt Georgia from complying with federal regulations that dictate the amount of water released from Georgia's reservoirs to protect federally protected mussel species downstream.
``We need to cut through the tangle of unnecessary bureaucracy to manage our resources prudently - so that in the long term, all species may have access to life-sustaining water,'' he said.
On Friday, Perdue's office asked a federal judge to force the Army Corps of Engineers to curb the amount of water it drains from Georgia reservoirs into streams in Alabama and Florida. Georgia's environmental protection director is drafting proposals for more water restrictions.
More than a quarter of the Southeast is covered by an ``exceptional'' drought - the National Weather Service's worst drought category. The Atlanta area, with a population of 5 million, is smack in the middle of the affected region, which encompasses most of Tennessee, Alabama and the northern half of Georgia, as well as parts of North and South Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia.
Georgia was placed under statewide water restrictions in April that limited outdoor watering to three days a week. By May Atlanta allowed watering only on weekends, and in September environmental officials banned virtually all outdoor watering through the northern half of the
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
That defines the line of maximum advance during the Wisconsin Glacial period.
Check that little yellow bump running up into Central Indiana ~ that's coincident with a deep grassland salient into the face of the Ice Sheet ~ in there is where you can actually find areas where you can walk around and pick up Clovis points! You also get Clovis points with those peculiarly European dimensions in that area.
During the great droughts people and animals would move North to the Ice Sheet where there was a constant flow of melt water.
This would have been one incredible hunting ground!
I’ve been wondering why this has barely gotten any national attention until now. The reports I’ve heard on t.v. indicate that Atlanta has less than 120 days of water left. Now the states in the area are fighting in court about who is stealing water from whom.
Is the federal government addressing this or is Chertoff in Homeland Security going to wait until a full-fledged panic sets in? This is all Republicans need in 2008, an enormous disaster in the South with millions of people having to leave because they have no water to drink, cook with, or bathe in. I hope Bush is formulating some kind of plan now and is not spending all of his time with the Dalai Lama, aids in Africa, placating the Mexicans, and the crisis in Pakistan.
This could make Katrina look like a cake walk. Where is the water going to come from? Convoys of trucks with bottled water aren’t going to cut it. You can’t set up a desalination plant and pipe the water inland to Atlanta and other metro areas. You can’t fly in water on cargo planes. What’s the answer here if it doesn’t rain? Hurricane season is almost over and the tropical systems that come into the Gulf and move into the south haven’t materialized. This is a potential catasrophe.
I was a member of the Gwinnett Water Authority for 3 years back in the early 90s, and vividly recall that we nearly had a water war with Alabama during that earlier drought.
Based on what I learned from the fine technical people then on staff with Gwinnett’s Utility Division and my own research, I’ve been telling anyone who would listen for 15 years that 2 years of drought would produce our current situation. This one has taken LESS than 2 years. If development continues at the present pace, the NEXT crisis is less than a year away.
In a nutshell, here’s the problem:
Atlanta has NO accessible aquifers beneath it as that red clay for which we are famous is underlain with granite. Any rainfall that manages to perk through that clay – on which I have personally broken several picks — eventually runs off that rock to the nearest river or lake. With only a handful of small rivers feeding it and Lanier and Allatoona the only nearby impoundments, Atlanta should probably never have been built here and/or developed to the extent it has.
Because it was – and has been — we now face some difficult/expensive choices:
* Curtail development. As a foe of bigger and more intrusive government, I hope this will come about as a natural function of the crisis — which will almost certainly happen — as the problem worsens and fewer people move here. Major developers have major political clout, further lessening the likelihood that area development will be curtailed in any meaningful way.
* Run a pipeline the 800 miles or so to one of the Great Lakes where can be found 20% of the planet’s fresh water. This is hardly likely as my relatives in Cleveland caution me that such a move would most probably rekindle the unpleasant events of the 1860s. The other problem is that that would be the mother of all inter-basin transfers – normally a major no-no in water management circles.
* Run a pipeline down Interstate 16 to Savannah to a desalinization plant. The cost for effective desalinization is approximately now around 2 bucks per thousand gallons. Add amortization of construction and maintenance costs and we’re certainly talking higher water costs. But what is the cost of not having ANY fresh water (as is now the case on much of the planet)? Push the water the 1,000 feet vertically or so here to Lanier and/or Allatoona to keep these lakes closer to full pool year round. As you read this, Georgia Power has several applications pending to add yet more nuclear power production to its already significant base. As nuclear is one of the least costly – and environmentally friendly — means of generating electricity (which is why France and Japan are around 80% nuclear!), the power for such a project ought to be relatively competitive.
And here’s the best part: Let PRIVATE INDUSTRY– with sensible (and NON-POLITICIZED) state oversight — do the project and keep the government out of it to the extent possible.
Couple that with sensible water conservation, replacing grass with drought-tolerant vegetation, minimizing the outflow from Lanier and Allatoona during periods such as this one to allow only essential downstream activities and estuary preservation, repairing and upgrading of Atlanta area water distribution lines (I’ve heard that some of those mains in Atlanta pre-date Sherman!) and we just MIGHT dodge the next bullet Mother Nature fires at us.
In the meantime, let’s not panic and shoot ourselves in the foot.
Look on the bright side. The people in New Orleans only had 48 hours to evacuate the city before Katrina. The people in Atlanta have 2,880 hours to evacuate before they run out of water.
Local tradition on an Autumn Saturday is for friends to come over, watch the Gators/Seminoles/Hurricanes on the tube and shuck some oysters (to make good use of the crackers, hot sauce and beer).
Hey, it starts out being their water up in Georgia and we're fortunate to get whatever they have left over.
Our local micro-climate here in Panama City gives us (nearly daily) convective sea-breeze thundershowers and we're way more than OK on potable water. Our water here comes from Deerpoint Lake which in turn comes from the spring-fed Econfina River at the rate of about 300 million gallons per day. We only sip about 45 million gallons from it each day.
Why is it that the people in an area that does not have a sufficient water supply continue population expansion without developing new water access and transportation systems?
In many way this seems to be Georgia’s own fault and I am not all that sure that the Feds should rush and great expense to correct a problem that was foreseen by the state government.
This seems to be a really big deal. On the cable news all morning.
There is certainly no question about that. A good start would be to remove "activist" "environmentalists" from the bureaucracy and replace them with people with sound judgment and good sense.
In the long term, why couldn't Georgia route water from the Savannah and Chattahoochee Rivers through metro-Atlanta, recollect it, and return the water reprocessed back into the rivers? I'm sure some of the engineers at Georgia Tech could figure out how.
And KICK THE "ENVIRONMENTALIST" OUT OF THE BUREAUCRACY and replace them with people of good judgment and practical good sense!
I see desalinization plants - and higher water prices - in Georgia’s future.
The Chattahoochee already runs through metro Atlanta - the city dumps its sewage in there.
Remember that Alabama shut-down a nuclear power generation plant in the northern part of the state this year because the river water used for cooling got to hot to cool the plant.
Alabama river levels are so low that barge traffic has been hindered or suspended. Transportation costs will go up as a consequence.
Yes, that's part of the problem, and part of the reason for the "water wars" between Florida, Alabama, and Georgia.
Atlanta has for some time wanted control over all the water, and hasn't been at all concerned with the industries and municipalities downstream that also have historically used this water.
I thought when we got three Republican governors that a solution would be found...but no. They can't reach an agreement either.
With right of way permits, some on private land, and environmental statements and the rest of the red tape, government should be gearing up already. It will take a lot of government action to get this project going quickly and soon and fast.
Have they considered the Tugaloo and the Chatooga?
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