Atlanta Water Shortage

This is the big question. Some think prayer might help, but no one things it will fix the problem, and inspiring our kids to get more involved might be of value in 15 years. What about for now?

While we need a worst-case scenario plan in place (like in Lawrenceville), we also need to come up with two other plans:

1 - A short-term plan to get us into better shape for now.
2 - A long-term plan to fix it for good.

Our state government, to this point, is doing very little to help. The water restrictions are still way too lenient, and the water will still flow far too quickly from Lanier even with a 16% reduction (which I expected to hear about today, but so far there is no news).

How about a long-term solution? Jay Bookman at the AJC has written a nice Opinion piece that compares our situation to that of New York. The comparisons are quite surprising:

• Alabama, Florida, Georgia share the ACF watershed
  • New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey share the Delaware River watershed
• Atlanta draws most of its water from the upper Chattahoochee
  • New York draws most of its water from the upper Delaware watershed
• Atlanta has to worry about endangered mussels
  • New York has to worry about endangered mussels

The difference is that they make it work, while we obviously can’t.  The article lays out a fairly simple plan for fixing the problem:

Well, if the three states can’t agree on a resolution, maybe they can agree to submit to a process and a deadline. We should assemble a panel of outside experts, give them a year and a sufficient budget, and then make their final recommendations binding on all three states and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. You take out the politics and the posturing, and you get a decision based on the facts of the case.

It’s a good read.

We finally got a little bit of rain, but it’s not expected to help the situation much.

Lanier got 0.11 inches of rain yesterday (while the lake fell about 3 more inches) and has seen a total of 0.92 inches today. Sadly, despite the rain, the lake is down 0.05 feet for the day — about 1/2 inch.

There may be a bit of good news, though.  The amount of water released from the dam by the Corps is calculated so that they can maintain a certain level in the Apalachicola river (5,000 cfs, currently).  If other streams that feed into the Chattahoochee south of the dam get some rain, they’ll feed more water into the river and the Corps can release less from the dam and still maintain the 5,000 cfs mandate.  However, the rain seems to have been lighter to the south and almost fully absorbed by the ground.

The 15-day forecast still doesn’t look good, with our next chance at rain more than a week away.

Also, as predicted a week ago, the Governor has pointed out that the rain came one day after the prayer vigil.  I don’t like to doubt what God can do, but I’m very skeptical that the useless rain we received last night had anything to do with the prayer vigil the day before.

The Lawrenceville Weather Blog often has some great posts, and their latest titled “How Long Could the Southeast Drought Last?” is no exception.

They go into great detail to explain how the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) trends affect our weather.  It’s quite an interesting read.

If you want me to cut to the chase, their data shows that we may be 1/3 of the way through a 20-year dry spell.  Ouch!  However, it’s more complicated than that and you should really read the whole post if you have a chance.

A press release from the Governors office today unveiled a contest for 3rd, 4th and 5th graders to develop a water conservation plan for their community.  The contest winner will receive $2000 to implement the plan in their area.  You can view the full PDF of the announcement here.

While I think that encouraging kids to think more about water conservation is a good thing, Perdue really needs to start doing things that will make a real difference now.  So far this week we’ve had this and the controversial prayer vigil.  That’s about it.  Where’s a real plan?  I’d like to see the governor develop and share two things:

1 - A plan to conserve water and/or get more water to the area to prevent disaster.  “Pray for rain” has been his best plan so far.
2 - In the event that we run out of water, develop a plan to deal with the aftermath, similar to how Lawrenceville already has.

Contests like this are cute, but time is running out.

(via 11Alive)  For reasons blamed on the drought and water restrictions, Pike Family Nurseries has filed for bankruptcy.

They have secured $11.75 million in financing to help operate and they expect no disruptions to their nusery operations and customer service.

After all of the outrage about the house in Cobb County that used 440,000 gallons of water in October, the owner has said he plans to drastically cut his usage.

According to the AJC, his usage for the past week has been about 2,000 gallons a day, which would be around 60,000 gallons a month.  That’s still very high, but it’s far better than the 440,000 from last month.

As many people suggested, it sounds like he had indeed been watering his lawn.  These two snippets from the article seem to confirm that.

First, we have this:  “He was very humble. It is my understanding he told his landscaper to stop all watering last week,” said County Spokesman Robert Quigley, who called Carlos.

Last week?  He shouldn’t have been watering at that point.  Also, the article says “Carlos was not doing anything illegal before Cobb limited outdoor watering on Sept. 20.“  That implies that he might have been doing things that were illegal after Sept. 20.

That still doesn’t explain where all of the water was going, but it’s nice to see he’s cutting back.

Most of the expected restrictions were passed yesterday, with the exception of Sandy Springs.  They were considering banning outdoor watering for all businesses, but decided not to do that yet.

Their reasoning makes sense — they get their water from the city of Atlanta, so they don’t feel that their businesses should have to squeeze tighter than the city does.

However, I think we’ll come to regret decisions like this if things get dire.  I tend to agree with their lone opposing council member, Karen Meinzen McEnerny, who said “We need to take leadership here, and not just go with the flow.”

The little forum we had on here was kind of nice, but it was not a robust enough script to handle things.  I’ve installed a much better one now for you to use.  In addition, I copied most the threads from the old forum so that interesting discussions from there could carry on.

You’ll need to register for a new account on there, but I otherwise hope you find the new forum easier to use.  Here’s a link to it.

Thanks.

(via AWS reader Vince) North Carolina is facing similar issues as us in this drought, but they seem to be doing a better job of cutting back on their usage.

According to this article, North Carolina has cut its water usage by about 30%.  This is short of the 50% reduction that Governor Mike Easley was aiming for, but it’s much better than the 9% reduction (which is 15-20% if you just want to make up some numbers) that we’ve seen from metro Atlanta.

We need to start stepping up.

(via AWS reader David O’Bannon) Lawrenceville appears to be the first metro-area city to develop a plan in case the water runs dry.

Part of their plan is to reopen some old wells, which we knew about a few weeks ago. They’ve taken that further and they’re working on plans to determine how best to distribute that water. Part of the plan involves pickup-mounted 200 and 300 gallon water tanks that would distribute water at four points throughout the city. The four distribution points are:

• Central Gwinnett High School
• The old K-Mart at the corner of Duluth Highway and Hurricane Shoals Road
• Margaret Winn Holt Elementary School
• The parking lot adjacent to the Rhodes Jordan Plant at the intersection of US 29 and Highway 124.

Residents would be allowed to bring one-gallon jugs to fill.

Councilman Mike Crow put it best — “Hopefully, nothing like this will ever occur in Lawrenceville, but we need to move forward to obtain the equipment and support for the Utilities Department to implement the plan.” That’s the thought that every part of north Georgia should have right now.

In addition, Crawford Long/Emory Hospital has reportedly stockpiled 40,000 gallons of bottled water, and have additional water stored beneath the hospital.

I expect we’ll see many more of these plans being developed over the next few weeks, as the lake level goes lower and lower. While there seems to be little that can be done to remedy the drought in the near-term, there is a lot of planning that needs to be done in case things eventually run dry. Props to Lawrenceville for being the first to take that step.