Cumming having to work hard to keep getting water from Lanier
(via an e-mail from AWS reader David) There are a couple of interesting stories today in the Gainesville Times about how Cumming and Gainesville are having to make some changes in order to keep getting water from Lake Lanier.
Gainesville is in pretty good shape, with intakes that go “all the way down to the bottom of the lake”. They say their two major intakes can work as low as 1023 and 1024 feet. That’s not exactly the bottom of the lake, but it’s pretty far down.
Cumming has bigger problems, but they’re working through them. One of their major intakes is at 1053 ft., which was put there in the 70’s because “there was no historical data that indicated that the lake would go below the 1053 elevation.” I don’t know how low the lake will ultimately get, but I’m positive it’ll be below 1053 (it’s at 1053.98 today).
To combat this problem, they’ve extended the intake pipe by about 50 feet to help it reach deeper, and they say it can be extended further if they need to. You can read the full story for more information.
November 11th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
So Gainsville could pull 100 million gallons a day, from down to 1025 feet or so? That suggests that there are pumps that can be installed to get the deadpool over the dam.
November 11th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Correct, and that is what the Corps has said they can do.
However, they’d need to be pumping 1-2 billion gallons a day over the dam. While I don’t doubt it can be done, what kind of pumps would be needed for something like that?
November 11th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Ten pumps, each the size of the one Gainsville has. Difficult. Expensive. Time consuming, but at least possible.
The time consuming part is what is bothering me. They’ve got months, not years. And they haven’t started yet.
November 12th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
But the really sad part is that they have had years to get ready for something like this. You would have thought that when they reached the 1981 low that once they started to come up that might have triggered some kind of thought process along the lines of what to do in terms of taking steps for future droughts. There is no way that we should be talking about what possible steps to take at this point in time.
November 12th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Government bureaucrats KNOW there is MORE money in reacting to a crisis than there is in planning to avoid one. I still feel someone in the power structure actually wants this tragedy to occur.
November 21st, 2007 at 10:52 pm
[...] few weeks ago, Cumming extended their intake pipe by about 50 feet to help it reach deeper into the lake. Next Monday they’ll begin the $1 [...]