You’re absolutely right that classes will not help if people choose to ignore what’s taught in them. And that is certainly possible, maybe even likely. But any education helps in my opinion.

Now, as far as using the classes as a way to monitor or enforce water restrictions, that’s a joke. I agree wholeheartedly.

Dave,

I agree with you that we should also be focused on saving electricity, because that will indirectly affect water demand from the power plants. Whether or not any reduction in water demand will get communicated back to the Corps to cut down on their releases is another story.

I think your idea of educating businesses on how to reduce their electricity usage is great. Perhaps the EPD could come out with a statement about this. Perhaps they could even put together a (dare I say it) class that businesses could take to learn how to become a more “green business.”

Personally, I don’t think that any business will agree to turn their sign lights off, because that’s advertising. But turning computers off at night might help. Many businesses leave them running all night long when no one is using them.

I don’t have an official study to point to, but I have spoken with state officials who agree that total Atlanta residential usage of water is only 3-4% of the water that is released from Lanier. So 96% or more of the water released from Lanier is for downstream needs and/or industrial needs, such as power plants, bottling plants, and other large water users.

So we can spend all our time talking about how we want to squeeze our little 3-4% even smaller. Or we can focus on the 96% that is flowing right by us every day, and trying to get the folks that use that water to cut back on their consumption. That’s what the government should be focused on in my opinion.

I’m amazed at the number of businesses that keep unecessary signage lights on from sundown until sunup. I understand there are security reasons for having lights on, but how many people see a restaurant’s specials or a church’s sign or a realtor’s phone number at 3:00 am?

Drive down any local main street after midnight and you can immediately see all the unecessary lighting. I can’t believe how many Christmas lights are still on each night!

I wonder if towns could evaluate business light usage, make recommendations to their business owners as to which lights they probably don’t need on all night, and give them an electric bill credit equal to the cost of a timer or timers. I know a sign is advertising, but again, so many lights on all night long that really don’t help a business during certain hours. Even if some of these lights were shut off from 1:00 am to 6:00 am, wouldn’t that help?

If you’re on a sewer system, most of the water that goes down your drains (showers, toilets, sinks, etc) makes it back to the river. If it’s back in the river, then it’s calculated against how much needs to be released from Buford Dam to keep the levels at Woodruff high enough. Therefore, using a lot of water at home really won’t affect the drought very much as long as most of that water makes it into the sewer.

If you water your grass, of if your house uses a septic tank, that water is essentially gone.

I’m starting to think that low-flow shower heads and things of that nature simply don’t provide much big-picture benefit. Anyone have any facts to agree or disagree with that? It’s pretty much just wild theory right now…

We can conserve all we want, but ultimately, the big water users are the problem, not people watering their yards sparingly.

Classes are not the ultimate solution, but it’s a step in the right direction. The public needs to be educated on how they can conserve water. So that’s positive.

But what we really need is a plan that takes a conservative approach to water usage and takes into account the unknown territory ahead of us.

What I propose is a cautious step by step approach. The EPD can loosen watering restrictions slightly for the spring, but then needs to keep an eye on water levels in Lanier. If they drop lower than a set amount that EPD decides, then we lose watering rights again.

And we can establish check points throughout the summer. The first one could be July 4. Then early August when kids go back to school, then Labor Day. Even if we only make it through July 4 and have to shut down our pools, we’ve still made it through 2 of our 3 major summer holidays, and all the summer recreation programs would have been able to conduct their seasons with only slight schedule modifications.

I think this is a common sense approach that doesn’t outright kill businesses and allows people to have some use of water and to enjoy water recreation. And it conserves our resources.