How much water is drained from Lake Lanier each day?
Doing some math on the USGS data for the past month, it appears that Lake Lanier has lost just over 32 billion gallons in the last 30 days. It’s widely reported that “over a billion gallons per day” is drained from Lanier, and that seems to be accurate (USGS numbers, which seem to be estimates, work out to 1,086,171,423 gallons per day). It’s also said that Atlanta only needs about half that much to get by, and the rest is sent south.
There’s about 475 billion gallons left in Lanier, which sounds like enough for about a year and half (475 billion gallons at 1 billion per day = 475 days). The problem is that most of the water is hard to get to. Once the level of the lake drops below 1035 feet it becomes much more difficult to get the water out (we’ll need barges and pumps).
The best solution is simply some rain. In the next day or two we’ll have a breakdown of exactly what rain would do for us — specifically, what would one inch of rain mean to the lake?
October 22nd, 2007 at 1:24 pm
[...] so 5.8 billion gallons goes into the lake. What does that do for us? Well, we know that the lake loses just over a billion gallons a day, so we can say that 5.8 billion gallons would give us about 6 days worth of [...]
February 23rd, 2008 at 4:22 pm
[...] so 4.5 billion gallons goes into the lake. What does that do for us? Well, we know that the lake loses just over a billion gallons a day, so we can say that 4.5 billion gallons would give us about 5 days worth of [...]
February 23rd, 2008 at 4:37 pm
[...] so 4.5 billion gallons goes into the lake. What does that do for us? Well, we know that the lake loses just over a billion gallons a day, so we can say that 4.5 billion gallons would give us about 5 days worth of [...]