Atlanta Water Shortage

For the first time since July, 2007, Georgia has moved from “exceptional” to “extreme” drought status.  While, it’s certainly an improvement, state climatologist David Stooksbury says “If this were a hospital patient, this would be like going from grave to critical”.

As you probably know, Lake Lanier is still way below normal.  It’s about 15 feet below its normal summer level, which equates to about 362 billion gallons low.

For the math on that number (please correct me if I’m wrong):

• Full pool is 2,554,000 acre-feet of water
• Lanier is currently holding around 1,443,000 acre-feet of water
• That means its down by 1,111,000 acre-feet
• There are 325,851.429 gallons per acre-foot, which means:
• 1,111,000 acre-feet = 362,020,937,619 gallons

That’s quite a lot of water.  The lake has been going up for the last few months, but it tends to plateau near the end of March and then start to drop.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens this summer.  Will we hit the magic 1035′ level (even if it’s not as bad as we thought)?  Lower than that?  What do you think?

EERE News is reporting on a study by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography that puts the odd at 50% that Lake Mead will drop too low for power production by the year 2017 and run completely dry by 2021.

If that were to happen, it would leave about 1.3 million people without power and approximately 8 million people without water.

From Save and Conserve:

The Lake Mead/Lake Powell/Colorado River system is currently at about 50% capacity. Based on current water use & projected future demand, the system is on an unsustainable death spiral. Things are so bad that there is a 10% chance Lake Mead could be dry by 2014. That should be alarming for residents of the southwest, to say the least.

These numbers are based on forecasted climate conditions and water demand.  If either of those variable shift, it could buy them a few more years.  Still, the future looks pretty bleak for that area.