Atlanta Water Shortage

Watercrunch tackles the big question — “is the drought over?”

In a word, no.  However, there continue to be promising signs.  The area of “exceptional drought” is getting smaller, and our forecast through May is “Drought ongoing, some improvement”, which sounds about right.

I really like the analogy that watercrunch uses: “Droughts are like a recession in a way, its hard to tell exactly when they first occur and hard to know exactly when they are over.”

Here in Georgia, we’re facing two kinds of drought:

1. The natural drought caused by a lack of rain, which might be easing up a bit.
2. The man-made drought, caused by sending billions of gallons down the river to Florida — some by mistake, some by law.

Until both of those problems are resolved, we’ll continue to be concerned. The recent rainfall has been nice, but Lanier continues to be way, way below where it should be.

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.