Atlanta Water Shortage

We posed the question before — when will the water run out?  The answer is usually another question: who knows?

Fortunately, we’ve got some ambitious people that use this site.  Ryan Kolter has spent a great deal of time building an informative page on our wiki to try to determine how long the water will last.  The page shows just how crazy all of the various predictions are, but having them all in once place really helps.  He updates the page daily with the latest information.

Specifically, his numbers show the various guesses on how long it will be until Lake Lanier reaches the deadpool.  As of today, the estimates vary from 61 days (February 2, 2008) up to 182 days (June 2, 2008), but most of the estimates are in late April or early May.

So go check out the predictions page for a complete list of the estimates, along with details about where each number came from.

The AJC has a neat story about a couple in Roswell that take water conservation to the extreme.

The couple lived in West Germany until the late 50’s.  Life in post-war Germany taught them to conserve everything possible, which they continue to this day.

The most interesting part of the article was about their rain barrel system.  They have 20 barrels connected to the downspouts from their roof.  5/16th of an inch of rain is enough to fill all 20 barrels, which totals over 640 gallons.  That’s quite a lot!

The article also mentions a few other water-saving measures — maybe a new idea or two for you to pick up.

(via Watercrunch)  The National Academy of Sciences has just published a report titled “Water Implications of Biofuel Production in the United States“.  The summary from the Watercrunch article:

The report basically states that if the projected increases in the use of corn for ethanol production occur, the harm to water quality could be considerable, and water supply problems at the regional and local levels could also escalate.

The Oil Drum has a much more in-depth look at the report, with many more charts and some great discussions.  Their summary suggests that Ethanol might not be the right solution to the oil problem.  From their site:

We CAN increase our internal production of transportation liquids. In addition to ethanol and biodiesel, we can use coal-to-liquids via Fischer Tropsch; we can drill the Arctic or Alaska Wildlife Refuge; we can expand land to dedicated energy crops, etc. A joint study of the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture concludes that the United States could produce 60 billion gallons of ethanol by 2030 through a combination of grain and cellulosic feedstocks, enough to replace 30% of projected U.S. gasoline demand. Scientists and policymakers should be asking them ‘at what cost’? When they reply XX billions, the comeback should be ‘we didn’t mean in $ terms-what are the costs in other scarce inputs needed by society?’. In robbing Peter to pay Paul, we have to realize that Paul is pretty insatiable. Who will we rob after Peter?

We have oil problems, so we’ll use more water to fix them.  Then the water problems become more severe.  What do we do next to try to fix those?  It could be an ugly cycle.

(note: the following is a guest post by AWS reader S. Corey Thomas)

A recent edition of Fresh Air on NPR featured an interview with Peter Gleick, a MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the non-partisan environmental think-tank, The Pacific Institute . Since 1998, Gleick has assessed the state of global water resources in a biennial report, The World’s Water. The fifth volume in this acclaimed series is now available, with a focus on the implications between water and terrorism and the increasing risks of flood and drought due to climate change and excessive development.

In this interview, Peter Gleick discusses the water crisis that looms over many areas of the United States, including Atlanta and the drought-stricken southeast. The difficulties of desalination are explored, as well as the environmental costs of bottled water versus tap water. Gleick notes that, in many places in the US, we have reached the limits of growth against the constraints of freshwater supplies. Atlanta would do well to pay attention to his message.

Below are some excerpts from the interview:

“The opportunity to build new dams and new reservoirs is pretty much gone. We’ve built on the good dam sites, and unfortunately some of the bad dam sites as well. We’re going to have to rethink the way we use the existing resources we have. There may be places to build new infrastructure, but I actually think the 21st century is going to be — in the United States especially — a century of water management, and smart use, and rethinking allocations of water from one user to another, and figuring out how to use the infrastructure we’ve built better.”

“In the past, the attitude has been ‘Build it, and we’ll figure out a way to get the water there.’ And that worked, to some degree, in the 20th century, but it’s not gonna work in the 21st century. There isn’t any more water. We’re at the limits of our resources here. And we’re not gonna go to Canada or Alaska, we’re not gonna desalinate seawater infinitely and move it to Las Vegas — it’s too far and too expensive. And so, the idea that we can grow without thinking about the resources that are available for that growth is an old idea, and it’s not going to work any longer.”

S. Corey Thomas

Just over a month ago, we posted about how using gray water might be a great way to help conserve water.  Now a UGA scientist has come out and said that gray water usage probably isn’t a good idea.

Todd Rasmussen, a hydrology professor at UGA, says that gray water is typically pretty safe, but has the potential to be dangerous as it could still contain traces of fecal matter, blood or other contaminants.  Even water that comes from a clean running sink (waiting for it to warm up before you shave, for example) is only good for about 24 hours until the chlorine evaporates or breaks down.

Maybe the best solution would be a gray water system that re-chlorinates the water before it’s pumped back into your toilets.  It’s not mentioned in the article, but it would seem to make sense.  Thoughts?

Las Vegas is in the midst of a seven year drought that has left Lake Mead (the lake created by Hoover Dam) nearly 100 feet low.

This article in the AJC explains some of things things they’ve done to fight the drought, which essentially offers suggest that Atlanta should follow.   They’ve saved about 18 billion gallons a year from 2002-2006, even though they had 330,000 more residents move into the area.

It’s a good read.  Thanks to Ryan for the link.

It seems a bit premature for this, but 11Alive has a story of a DeKalb business that was getting water stolen from one of their outside faucets.

Apparently, trucks with water tanks would park outside of Gary’s Auto Shop on the weekends and fill up using water from their front faucet.

At this point, I can’t figure out what the motive is.  Water prices haven’t gone up (though they should) and no one has run out yet.  I certainly expect we’ll see more of this in the coming months, but I’m surprised to see it happening already.

An article this past Sunday in the AJC (thanks to Stephen for the link) goes into detail about how much water is used to generate electricity.

I think this sums it up best (bold emphasis mine):

Government agencies, however, have calculated that thermoelectric plants with once-through cooling use an average of 25 gallons of water to produce one kilowatt hour of power.

The average Georgia household burns 1,100 kilowatt hours of electricity a month. That translates to about 27,000 gallons of water.

By comparison, a family of four goes through about 9,000 gallons a month for household uses such as washing clothes, flushing toilets and showering.

It sounds like we should be bragging about how much we’ve reduced our electric usage each month, not just our water. However, I’ve not heard anything from our leaders about reducing electricity to help with the drought — but I think we should.

Sara Barczak, who was quoted in that AJC article, helped write this PDF titled “Climate change implications for Georgia’s water resources and energy future”, from the 2007 Georgia Water Resources Conference back in March of this year. It’s a long document, but well worth reading.

There are approximately 1500 churches in the metro Atlanta area, so I thought it would be interesting to see how they’re trying to save water.

I found a list of the 25 largest churches (paper list — sorry, no link) and e-mailed them all and asked what they’re trying to do to save water. I was quite disappointed that most of them didn’t take the time to respond.  I sent the e-mail about three weeks ago, so they’ve had plenty of time.

Since I personally work at a church, I’ve been trying to think of things we can do to cut back. It’s tough to figure out. Our main use (now that we obviously don’t water the grass anymore) is likely from the restrooms, so we make sure nothing is leaking. Beyond that, though, what can be done? I had hoped to gain insight from the churches that responded.

Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta stopped watering their new installs a while back, despite having a permit to do so. This saved nearly 500,000 gallons/month.

First Baptist Church in Woodstock followed a similar plan. Prior to the watering ban, they cut back on irrigating and they are very stringent about ensuring that no sinks, toilets or water fountains are leaking. They also are looking at retrofitting to automatic sink and toilet fixtures, which could save some water.

I had a few churches tell me that they were forwarding my e-mail onto so-and-so that could answer my questions, but then I never heard back.

So where does that leave us?  I see three problems:

• First, these churches as a whole have horrible customer service.  I know this is something that many churches work very hard at, so the complete lack of response from so many churches was pretty sad.  Only four replied at all and only two of those took the time to answer my questions.  The other 21 churches apparently were too ashamed to admit that they’ve done nothing to help save water.
• Second, obviously, churches aren’t doing much to help save water.
• Finally, churches don’t know what to do to help save water.

So I’m asking you: what can churches do to help conserve water?  The techniques we use at home don’t really apply (put a bucket in the shower, brush your teeth differently, etc), so what can be done?

Studies tend to show that about 20-40% of the US attends church each week.  With five million people in Atlanta, that’s 1-2 million people per week.  There’s a lot of water that could be saved.

Before anyone suggests it, this isn’t the place to talk about the whole “pray for rain” thing.  I’m simply curious to see legitimate suggestions that any church (from 10 members to 10,000 members) could take and use.

The AJC has put together a nice map showing all of the major users (water systems, industrial, power plants and recreational) along the Chattahoochee river basin — 36 users highlighted in all.

Seeing this helps to explain why so much water is released from Lanier each day.  The water from there needs to feed all of those places and still be at 5,000 cfs (3.2 billion gallons/day) when it is in Florida.

However, there are many small creeks and rivers that feed into the river to help reach the 5,000 cfs flow.  The problem is that all of those rivers are running below normal, which means they have to drain even more water from Lanier to help make up for it.

The 16% reduction that may or may not happen starting today would be a reduction in that 5,000 cfs mandate, lowering it 4200 cfs.  This would mean that the releases from Lanier could be reduced a bit, though they might see a slow increase after that to compensate for less and less help from the other rivers feeding into the Chattahoochee.