Atlanta Water Shortage

There was an announcement today that the army corps of Engineers is going to increase the water flows out of Lake Lanier.

Representatives from Georgia, Florida and Alabama regularly get to together on a conference call with the Corps of Engineers to discuss water issues. Thursday’s call produced bad news for Georgia and Lake Lanier.

The Corps of Engineers denied metro Atlanta’s request to minimizewater releases from Lake Lanier for another month. It was good news for Florida and Alabama who opposed the corps’ decision last year to reduce releases from November through April 30.

With the summer months rapidly coming up and the lake still below “normal” levels, it seems a bit premature to start draining the lake just because the past 6 months have had abnormally high water levels.

Read more commentary here.

Just 3 months ago at the end of November, Lake Lanier was very close to it’s record low of 1,050.81 feet. It got all the way down to 1,051.35 feet just 1/2 a foot away from the record. Since November there has been a solid amount of precipitation (even snow) that have helped fill the lake up to 1,057.45 feet as of March 1st, 2009. That is an increase of 6 feet in a short amount of time and a good start to 2009 for Lake Lanier.

60 Day Graph

Last week the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran an article on the creation of 10 new water councils all throughout the state. Each council will be made up of “farmers, government officials, businessmen and others” and will be tasked with determining how to divide rivers, lakes and underground aquifers.

Gov. Sonny Perdue, responsible for more than half the appointments, said in a statement that those chosen are “a diverse group of Georgians” who will “focus on water resource issues while also addressing the state’s economic needs.”

But leaders of the Georgia Water Coalition, a statewide group of environmental and civic organizations that advocates for clean water, immediately criticized the absence of environmentalists among the appointees.

Only one of the state’s eight Riverkeepers, Satilla Riverkeeper Gordon Rogers, was named to a council. Rogers will serve on the Suwanne-Satilla regional council in southeast Georgia.

To read the entire article click HERE.

Not much to report, just thought I drop in a quick picture of Lake Lanier’s water level over the last 60 days.

There’s been a ton of talk about new carbon emission standards and with Obama now in the White House, there will probably be a lot of money spent on new legislation, new policies and all with the aim or curbing or slowing down global warming.

Personally I think that many people miss the big picture when it comes to global warming. The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years and has survived just fine with us and will do just fine without us. Throughout the history of the earth there has been a definite movement between warm and cold periods. I think that what is misunderstood most about these temperature changes in the past is that everyone assumes they are extremely gradual.

For example you hear people talk about an ice age that lasts 10,000 years or a warmer period that may last 5,000 years, but in the middle of those overall trends there have been period of 50 years or even 100 years that may completely buck the trend. One of the great examples I read about was when the great conveyor – seen here which is huge underwater river in the ocean more than 40 times as large as all the fresh water rivers on earth, part of it stopped flowing in the not too distant path (maybe 20 to 30,000 years ago). Well the warm water the great conveyor brings up from the equator keeps much of continental Europe and the east coast of the US to some extent much warmer than it would be normally.

When the great ocean conveyor belt stopped flowing, the climate of France took about 3 years to be plunged into extremely cold weather and much of Europe experienced the same conditions. Many scientists are saying that now because of the melting of the north pole ice, the extra fresh water may serve to disrupt or partially half the great conveyor – which has been theorized adds close to 10-15 degrees of warmth to the areas it passes through.

Here is the direct quote from this article that I found particularly enlightening:

For early humans living in Europe 30,000 years ago – when the cave paintings in France were produced – the weather would be pretty much like it is today for well over a thousand years, giving people a chance to build culture to the point where they could produce art and reach across large territories.

And then a particularly hard winter would hit.

The spring would come late, and summer would never seem to really arrive, with the winter snows appearing as early as September. The next winter would be brutally cold, and the next spring didn’t happen at all, with above-freezing temperatures only being reached for a few days during August and the snow never completely melting. After that, the summer never returned: for 1500 years the snow simply accumulated and accumulated, deeper and deeper, as the continent came to be covered with glaciers and humans either fled or died out. (Neanderthals, who dominated Europe until the end of these cycles, appear to have been better adapted to cold weather than Homo sapiens.)

So is Global Warming a bit of red herring, when we really should be worried about Global Cooling?

Saw an interetsing article in the AJC, from over a week ago: It Takes More Than This To Break The Drought

The weather has gone cold and dry and looks to be that way for the next 5-6 days, but long terms it’s anyone’s guess if the more normal winter weather returns w/ increased rainfall. December was extremely wet and helped rebuild Lake Lanier quite significantly. However, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division says the ban on all outdoor watering won’t be changed for communities that depend on Lake Lanier for their water until the lake returns to normal.

“It actually takes four months of all drought indicators to be normal before we can move out of a proscribed drought level.”

So it might be quite a while before the drought is officially over.

I was reading the Wall Street Journal on my flight into Atlanta late Tuesday night to visit relatives and saw that Georgia had made the front page of the WSJ. The article talks about Sonny Perdue’s $19 million dollar plan to make the state one of the most popular fishing destinations in the country.

The administration recently began construction on a $14 million dollar “Go Fish Georgia Center,” featuring a fish hatchery, visitor’s center, and public fishing ponds about 12 miles from Mr. Perdue’s hometown of Bonaire. The 15,000 square-foot building will feature interactive exhibits, including fishing simulators where visitors in a fake boat can struggle against computer controlled fish.

This sounds like quite a controversial plan given the timing of this – seems to me that it would take quite a bit for Georgia to become the fishing capital of the US. Perdue is quoted as saying that, “even if lakes stay low that will make it easier to get the fish.” Sonny also told reporters, “Would you rather catch a big fish in your bathtub, or in your swimming pool?”

With all this December rain, Lake Lanier is rapidly gaining much needed water supplies. Today there are flood watches up for many Georgia counties and the heavy rainfall is definitely helping out. Is this is a genuine recovery of water levels – or is it a short term blip that will be forgotten when everything dries out again. Are we looking at the start of a new weather pattern for Georgia and the return to more rain?

I took a look at the City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management website (http://www.AtlantaWatershed.org) and found a neat interactive projects map. This map shows all the current projects going on in the greater Atlanta area. The orange cones are local projects and the blue cones are city wide projects. You will need Flash installed to use the map, but roll your mouse over the cones and click them and you can see the details on the individual projects. Here is the link to the map:

Interactive Project Map

Straight from an AJC article, it talks about the big picture for Lake Lanier. Weeds and shrubs have invaded the shore and boat ramps end way before they reach the water and the impact reaches out beyond just the lake.

The relentless drought that first crept into metro Atlanta more than two and a half years ago has many victims, from landscapers to fishing guides. None show more visible scars than Lanier.

Last year, the lake’s red clay-ringed shoreline made national news, along with dire warnings that the South’s capital city could run out of water. Lanier is out of the spotlight this year, but not much better off.

This last comment seems to echo many of the posters here, Lake Lanier seems very much out of the spotlight this year and receives very little attention.