Atlanta Water Shortage

For the first time since this this blog was started nearly two months ago, the level of Lake Lanier went up due to the rain yesterday.

Granted, it only went up by 0.01 feet (about 1/10 of an inch), and it’s already dropping today, but it was certainly nice to see.

Creative Loafing has an interesting spin on people that are starting to stockpile water — they might be contributing to the water problem.

It’s a relatively low number, but Coca-Cola’s Dasani bottling plant in Marietta uses better than 8 million gallons of water per month, all which comes from Lake Allatoona.  As Thomas Wheatley, the author of the article, told me — “I wrote about the sheer irony that if we ran out of water, we’d be drinking just preserved stuff of what we watched dwindle away.”

The article also gets into the crazy pricing system for water (the more they use, the less they pay), but also talks about how Coca-Cola has made strides in the last few years to cut back.  It’s a good read.

As we’ve mentioned before, power plants are massive users of water.  Because of that, saving energy in your house can mean saving water.  WSAV has a nice list of tips on how to save some energy around the home.

Also, 11Alive has some new drought-related pictures on their site.  It’s amazing what happens when a lake is 20 feet low…

It appears that there is a lot of mis-information out there about exactly what will happen when Lake Lanier drops below 1035 feet.  Every media outlet has been giving out bad information (including us), so here is our attempt to set it straight.

(For the full story, you can read the comments from this post, but I’ll give you a summary.)

We had understood that once Lake Lanier dropped below 1035′, things would get bad.  The water quality would get much worse.  Pumps and barges would be needed to get water over the dam.  Things like that.

I spoke with Michael Lapina of the Army Corps of Engineers a few days ago, based off of things people had said in that thread.  According to him, the “dead pool” isn’t really a big deal.

Right now, water already comes from the “dead pool” at the bottom of the lake.  It flows from the bottom, through the dam, then out into the river.  As the water flows through it powers three turbines in the dam that generate electricity.  The two largest turbines require significant “head pressure” to function.  As the lake gets lower, the head pressure decreases.  The turbines are already running at a lower rate due to the lower level of the lake.  At 1035′, the head pressure will be too low for them to function.  The third turbine, which is much smaller than the other two, will function down to about 1020′.

That’s it.  There will be no need for “pumps and barges” to get water over the dam.  We won’t suddenly be getting water that’s much worse than the current water.  Essentially nothing will change, other than the dam losing its ability to generate power.   The dam will be able to release water freely down to 919 feet, which is the bottom of the lake.

Losing the power generation won’t be a good thing (especially next summer when everyone fires up the A/C), but the grid should be able to handle the load.

All in all, this is very good news.  However, you need to keep in mind that as the lake gets lower, the level of the water will drop more quickly.  I figured that if they needed to use pumps and barges to get the water out, they might not be able to release as much every day and it might prolong things for us.  Now that we know they can release the water freely, the lake will continue to lose water as quickly as it is right now.

The dead pool holds about 40% of the capacity of the lake, so it’s still a decent amount of water.  Still, with a dry winter predicted, things could be looking really ugly by spring.

(via Freshloaf)  The director of Florida’s Dept. of Environmental Protection has sent a letter to the Corps in which they complain about the reduced flow out of Lake Lanier.  The flow was reduced by 5% last month, but Florida says that the lack of water from the river is increasing the salinity in the bay, which is killing oysters.

The oysters in Apalachicola Bay depend on a rather specific mix of fresh water (from the river) and salt water (from the ocean) to stay alive.  In addition, the fresh water helps to stave off predators that require saltier water to survive.

It should be interesting to see where this debate ends up…

A few months back, Gov. Sonny Perdue mandated all Atlanta-area water systems to cut their usage by 10% when compared to their monthly average from last winter.  The numbers from November are in, and not everyone made it to the 10% goal.  Some of the totals that were listed in the article:

• Atlanta - “about 7%”
• Cobb County - “just barely” met the 10% goal
• DeKalb - 8.3%
• Fulton County - “just made it under the new target”
• Gwinnett - Maybe, maybe not — depends on how you read the numbers.

Those that didn’t make it to the goal will likely see some fines sent their way.  Those fines will likely work their way into their customer’s water bills.

I feel kind of bad for some of them.  For example, as Francis Kung’u, director of DeKalb County Department of Watershed Management said — “We were very close” and that they “tried everything to get customers to conserve and even had water employees patrol at night to catch watering ban violators.”  What else could they do to force their customers to conserve more?

Of course, the best way to get these goals to be met would be to simply lay down tougher restrictions.  I keep thinking that they’ll tighten them pretty soon, but it hasn’t happened yet.

State officials don’t have much of a plan in place because they don’t think it’s very likely that we’ll run out of water.

Tim Cash, the chairman of the state’s Drought Response Working Group said:

“We have not gotten to the planning stages for someone running out of water because we don’t think we’re even close to being there… Right now, I don’t have a vision for a worst-case scenario.“

He also said that:

“nobody out there is at imminent peril of their water supply disappearing tomorrow“.

I think we knew that.  We’re more worried about next year.   Mr. Cash seems to agree:

“We are trying to anticipate what could be further down the road in ‘08 if the drought continues to worsen, which I believe everyone is expecting it to do.“

Let me get this straight; he agrees that the drought will likely get worse next year, but doesn’t even need to consider a worst-case scenario?  In addition, they’re…

“not talking to the city of Atlanta.  The city of Atlanta water supply looks good.“

I know it looks pretty good right now, but we’re talking about millions of people, which will require the most preparation in case of disaster.  You’d hope they were at least discussing things at this point.

In a similar vein Buzz Weiss, a spokesman for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency said:

“I don’t really think there’s a sense we’ll be at a point where there is no water.“

All of this worries me a little bit.  We’ve still got a good bit of water left, but no one knows what next year will bring.  If it’s dry, we could potentially be in big trouble.  I had assumed that the state was starting to get plans to together to prepare for that possibility, but it seems I was wrong.

I’m not suggesting we panic quite yet (we’ve still got roughly 150 days left) , but the “just in case” planning needs to get in gear.

Anyhow, read the article at the AJC for the full story.

The Army Corps of Engineers have decided to reduce the flow out of Lake Allatoona by 40-50 percent, in an effort to keep more water available in the lake for 2008.

However, the article doesn’t give many details.  When will this reduction start?  What reasons were given for the reduction?  If it can be done now, why couldn’t it have been done earlier?

If any of you have more information about this, please post in the comments below.

A handful of useful links for today:

•  The AP has a story about what kind of steps might need to be taken if we run out of water.  It discusses some of the water being stockpiled for the city, what Macon did when they ran out of water 13 years ago, and what cities like Durham (NC) and Athens are faced with right now.
• 11Alive says that the meeting schedule for next Monday between the Georgia, Florida and Alabama governors has been postponed by one week.  This meeting should help to set-up a long term agreement of some sort between the states.
• The AJC discusses some of the issues that are popping up as the lake levels drop.  Among the problems:
  • The lowest intake on Lake Allatoona may need some work, since it hasn’t been used since the mid-1960’s.  If the intake doesn’t work, they plan to spend $600,000 (plus $250,000/month) to run a mile-long pipe into deeper water.
  • Cumming continues to dredge the lake in an effort to access deeper water (as we mentioned a few weeks ago).  This dredging is stirring up so much sediment that the water plant has been shut down onsome days.
  • Some water in Cobb County had a greenish hue this summer from an excess of manganese.  The article didn’t say it, but it sounds like we might see more of that as the lakes get lower.

We posed the question before — when will the water run out?  The answer is usually another question: who knows?

Fortunately, we’ve got some ambitious people that use this site.  Ryan Kolter has spent a great deal of time building an informative page on our wiki to try to determine how long the water will last.  The page shows just how crazy all of the various predictions are, but having them all in once place really helps.  He updates the page daily with the latest information.

Specifically, his numbers show the various guesses on how long it will be until Lake Lanier reaches the deadpool.  As of today, the estimates vary from 61 days (February 2, 2008) up to 182 days (June 2, 2008), but most of the estimates are in late April or early May.

So go check out the predictions page for a complete list of the estimates, along with details about where each number came from.