1) Evaporation loss is negligable. While it exists, remember you are talking about evaporation only of the water you’d conserve by drawing less water from the river (2 gallons in my example). And of that loss, you only can claim the loss due to evaporation that is greater than the evaporation that water would experience running down the river.

2) Leakage is more significant, but remember that while much of Atlanta’s sewer system is antique, sewage is not pressurized. So for example, sewage doesn’t really leak into groundwater, but groundwater can leak -into- the sewage system (groundwater is under pressure). You’re also not considering rainwater, which “leaks” into the system. There are more leaky inputs than outputs, generally speaking, in a sewage system.

That tunnel needs to be built. The racial argument is a ridiculous reason not to build it, and the impact can be acheived will be enormous without having to ban swimming pools, or lose jobs from shutting down industires such as landscaping, bottling plants, agriculture, etc.

I like your idea in theory. Aside from the other questions/concerns listed on this post, I have two additional questions/conerns.

1. does the Corps get reports from the water treatment plants on their discharges and then adjust their releases from Lanier based on that? Because if the Corps doesn’t know or care about treated water releases, then they’re just going to release the same amount of water their manual tells them to. In that case, it wouldn’t help save us anything.

2. With the small amount of daily water that Atlanta uses compared to daily releases from Lanier, I don’t think it would save enough to make a material difference.

But all conservation efforts are good.

For further information about this inter-basin transfer problem in metro Atlanta, see http://georgiawaterplanning.org/Files_PDF/20060818_SAC_Discussion_Paper.pdf

And there are other considerations besides merely quantity of water. Andrew S. has a good point - the less water in a stream the less water there is to dilute the pollution being put into the stream. And that extra gallon of water you take out of the stream to flush is a gallon of water that isn’t availible to fish, mayflies, mussels, and crayfish. I know some people don’t care about fish, mussels, mayflies and crayfish, but I do and I’m not very comfortable with people being flippant about their fate. Their well-being is a reflection of the health of the rivers - the same rivers we depend on for drinking water and our fishing and aquatic recreation industries. When stream animals are doing poorly, the wise person doesn’t ask “why should we care about them,” but rather “what’s wrong with our rivers.”