Water Bizzaro-World

I have lived in Atlanta for 20 years and we are experiencing the worst drought in my time here. Lake Lanier and Lake Allatoona are being drained dry. For a burgeoning extended metropolitan population of about 5M a crisis is at hand.

The Chattahoochee River feeds Lake Lanier and is by far the largest supplier of water to greater Atlanta. Given the impressive size of the Chattahoochee River it actually drains a surprisingly small area of the Appalachian foothills of north Georgia. As the Chattahoochee goes so goes Atlanta's water.

In spite of the increasingly limited water supply local city and county government continue to approve development at a breakneck pace. Water does not seem to come into this equation. One of the largest consumers of water in Atlanta is a Pepsi Gatorade plant. Are you kidding me? Place a producer of flavored and "enhanced" water on an industrial scale in a city with no water margin of error? Madness. For all I know Pepsi was granted tax incentives to locate here. We would be better off paying for them to move to Chattanooga where they can tap in to the seemingly endless resources of the Tennessee River system.

Is the water being fed into Lake Lanier really that reduced? Surprisingly the answer is no. The Corp of Engineers, which has responsibility for the lake and the release of water, has different priorities than Atlanta. Instead of the traditional role of a reservoirs to control flooding and store water to be used in a time of drought, the Corp sees its role as maintaining a constant flow of water downstream from Lake Lanier, without regard to inflows.

Shockingly the Corp is releasing twice as much water from Lanier as is coming in! The rational: providing a consistent level of water downstream from Lake Lanier so a small coal fired plant can operate and to protect an endangered specie of freshwater mussels near the gulf end of the river.

I am a strong advocate for preventing extinction of flora and fauna by human means. But consider this - if there were no dams along the Chattahoochee River then the mussels would curretly be experiencing one half of the water flow that they are receiving today. Common sense dictates that this is not the first drought affecting the Chattahoochee in the last 5,000 years - yet the mussels survived. When Govenor Sonny Perdue recently implored the Corp of Engineers to reduce the amount of water leaving Lake Lanier, the Corp responded by releasing even more water.

On a recent tour of agricultural operations in South Georgia Govenor Perdue said that we needed to pray for rain. I don't know if God will respond, but hopefully the Corp of Engineers, who apparently see themselves at the right hand of God, will employ some common sense and support a balanced solution for all stakeholders.

Just splitting the difference between Atlanta and the mussels by reducing the outflows from Lake Lanier by some percentage would be a win-win. Atlanta would have considerably more water and the mussels would have more water than if there was not a single human being on the planet.