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.

Lake Lanier rose nearly six inches yesterday, the largest single-day rise since I started this blog last October.  The USGS counted 0.65 inches of rain yesterday at Buford Dam, but others have seen totals over 2 inches (in the comments).

All in all, we’re still running a little below the normal pace for the year, but we’re doing a bit better than this time last year.  However, Lanier is still much lower than it was at this time last year, so we could use a few more soaking storms.

If you measure rainfall at your house, how much have you seen in the last few days?

A story at 11Alive tells us that Gwinnett County will allow landscapers, construction companies and others to take reclaimed wastewater from the F. Wayne Hill Water Resources Center and use it for irrigation, street washing, sewer cleaning, etc.

Once again, it seems that some people don’t understand how things work. From the article:

Every day, 18 million gallons of waste water is treated at Gwinnett’s F. Wayne Hill Water Resources Center until it is clean enough to place in the Chattahoochee River. Until now, the river is exactly where the water has gone, where it has floated gently away from Bradley [local landscaper] and other businesses that need it for watering lawns or street washing.

They make it sound like putting water back into the river is a bad thing, while the opposite is actually true. The more you put into the river, the less they need to release from Lake Lanier to keep the flow rate high enough in Florida. If you put less back into the river, more water will need to be released from Lanier to compensate.

That being said, I don’t think this will make a huge difference. The water can only be taken away by certified tank truck drivers, not via pipes, which will greatly reduce how much is lost. However, it sounds like landscapers are excited to waste their share of water. Bradley Griffin of Russell Landscape Group said:

“The sky’s the limit with just how much our company can use. Multiply that by all of the other landscape companies and construction companies, this is a big deal.”

Yea!  Waste as much as you want!

However, water is already pumped from there to two golf courses, a county park, a city park and the Mall of Georgia. According to the AJC, those facilities used 209 million gallons of water last year. That makes a difference.

I’m guessing that those facilities are able to freely use the water for irrigation, since the water was just going to be “wasted” by going down the river. Anyone know what kind of restrictions those businesses are under for using that water?

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.

An article in the AJC today tries to answer the question: “Can reservoirs ease Georgia’s drought?”

I don’t think more reservoirs will help us in the short-term, but certainly could be a big part of the long-term solution.  There are a number of reservoirs underway in Georgia, but the article doesn’t talk about much in the way of specific data about them.  What it does say:

• There are a dozen being built in Georgia, seven in metro Atlanta.
• Most of these proposed reservoirs are between 150-800 acres (compared to Lanier’s 38,000 acres).
• There are eight more that have been approved since 2000, and “most have been built”.
• The total capacity of those eight is around 200 million gallons/day.

The article says that the 200 million gallons coming from the eight completed reservoirs is more than enough for Atlanta and Fulton County, but it doesn’t mention if those reservoirs are full and active, or dry and waiting.

Anyone have a good list of active/pending reservoirs, their size/capacity and their current status?  It would be interesting to see what the situation really looks like.

11Alive has posted an article featuring Dr. David Stooksbury, a state climatologist.  He makes a few good points:

• March is the make or break month for the drought.
• We should receive about 1-1/4 inches of rain per week in March.
• Last March started out very wet, then turned dry.
• Recent rains haven’t helped the north Georgia river flows.

Based on his statement of 1-1/4 inches per week, that means we need to average about 0.17 inches per day (1.25 inches divided by 7 days in a week).

So far this month we’ve seen a total of 2.04 inches in nine days, or an average of about 0.23 inches/day, which is above average.  Lake Lanier continues to slowly refill, but it needs to get going in a hurry and start gaining some more ground on the 16 foot deficit.

I appreciate what DeKalb County is trying to do here, but it seems pretty stupid once you dig into it. Starting in a few months, if you buy an older house in DeKalb County and it doesn’t have low-flow toilets, the county won’t hook up water to your house.

The move was praised by most people. From the article:

“This is really a pretty big deal,” said Sally Bethea, executive director of the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper. She said metro Atlanta will face increasing pressure to conserve water as the population grows.

Here’s the catch - DeKalb County gets their water from the Chattahoochee River and returns the wastewater there. The “wasted” water that is flushed down the old toilets goes back into the river and finds its way to Jim Woodruff Dam in Florida. This is where they measure the flow of water coming from Atlanta to determine how much more to release from Lanier. As long as the water makes it back into the river, it’s not depleting the level of the lake. Here is a post from a few weeks ago where we went into more detail about that.

Granted, not 100% of the water makes it back, so this move will save a little bit of water. Some is lost to leaks, some evaporates, etc.  However, given the horrible real estate market we’re in, anything that makes things hard on people trying to sell their house seems like a bad idea. From the article:

Barbara Campbell, president of the DeKalb Association of Realtors, wondered how the county would enforce its mandate on sellers to disclose their old toilets. Selling a house is hard enough, especially in this economy, she said. “When you’re selling your home, I don’t think you’re going to be announcing that.”

I agree.

Following up on our post from a few days ago, here is a chart showing Lanier’s level over the past few years.  Click on the chart to view it full-sized.

The final few months of 2007 really left the lake in bad shape.  It’s going to take a lot of rain to get caught back up.

As with the other data, I’ll try to update this chart around the first of each month.

Three new things that I hope will make this site a little more useful for you:

1. The latest forum posts are now listed in the sidebar on the right side of the page.
2. You can now receive e-mail notification of new comments by checking the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” box when leaving a comment on an item.
3. The top five users with the most comments are listed in the sidebar.  This total is reset monthly.

If you have any other suggestions or any news tips, be sure to let me know.

Thanks!

Mickey

I’ve had a number of e-mails asking how Lake Lanier’s current level compared to previous years.  This post is for you!

Using this pile of data as our guide, we have:

• March 1, 2008 — 1053.41′ AMSL
• March 1, 2007 — 1066.89′
• March 1, 2006 — 1069.18′
• March 1, 2005 — 1070.39′

Yeah, that’s not good.  Last summer was obviously pretty rough, yet we started more than 13 feet higher than we are right now!  March is typically our wettest month of the year, so we need to hope that holds true.

The short-term forecast is looking pretty good, but forecasts won’t fill the lake.   I’ll try to start posting this information around the first of each month so we can see how things progress.