The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 10/11/07
Lake Sidney Lanier, metro Atlanta's main source of water, has about three months of storage left, according to state and federal officials.
That's three months before there's not enough water for more than 3 million metro Atlantans to take showers, flush their toilets and cook. Three months before there's not enough water in parts of the Chattahoochee River for power plants to make the steam necessary to generate electricity. Three months before part of the river runs dry.
We've never experienced this situation before," state Environmental Protection Division Director Carol Couch said of the record-breaking drought and fast-falling lake.
In two weeks, Couch plans to give Gov. Sonny Perdue a list of options to further restrict water use by businesses and industries, along with an analysis of potential water savings and estimated job losses. Some exemptions to the state's ban on outdoor watering in north Georgia could end, including those applied to water-dependent businesses such as car washes, pressure washing companies and landscapers. Couch's staff is still working on the details.
She said she fully expects an economic hit if substantial rain doesn't fall soon and the emergency actions are taken.
"There has to be a balance between determining how much water we can conserve against how much lost jobs and lost economy there is," Couch said. "You don't do that lightly."
Landscapers already have suffered. Days after the outdoor ban was ordered Sept. 28, Mary Kay Woodworth of the Urban Agriculture Council trade group said landscapers' phones around the region stopped ringing. "Immediately, employees were laid off. Contracts waiting on signatures — from $3,000 jobs to $150,000 installations — were canceled."
Other heavy water users are considering their options. A Pepsico Inc. plant that produces Gatorade, which is the biggest water user in the city of Atlanta, is figuring out ways to cut down further on its use in the next 30 days. Coca-Cola is waiting to see what restrictions might be imposed at its Atlanta syrup plant, but has already cut back as part of a corporate water conservation plan.
Some water providers are asking big users like manufacturers to voluntarily cut back and are making emergency plans to install equipment to pump water from unprecedented depths of Lanier and the Chattahoochee.
Fate depends on Corps
How bad things could get depends on rain, and the forecast is not promising. October is normally the year's driest month, and climatologists say another dry, warm winter is ahead.
Metro Atlanta's water fate also depends largely on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that owns and operates Buford Dam and the 38,000-acre lake that sits behind it, bordered by Gwinnett, Hall and Forysth Counties. This month, the Corps has released from Lanier more than four times as much water as flows in from the Chattahoochee and other feeder streams. But that's far less than last month, when the Corps released 35 times as much water out of Lanier than flowed in.
More than a billion gallons leave the lake every day, more than twice the amount metro Atlanta uses. Much of it flows past the city into West Point Lake, another federal reservoir near LaGrange, then along the Alabama border and eventually to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.
Pat Stevens, an environmental planner for the Atlanta Regional Commission who regularly keeps tabs on how much water is available for Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb and other metro Atlanta governments, said the Corps' "wastes water unnaturally."
"When you move into a drought like we've moved into, you'll drain the system," Stevens said.
The Corps' water releases are based on two key requirements: the minimum flow needed to operate Plant Scholtz, Gulf Power's small coal-fired facility just below Lake Seminole, and federal mandates to protect two mussel species in a Florida river.
If the Chattahoochee were undammed and running freely, Mother Nature would be providing only half the water the Corps is sending, Corps officials have said.
Val Perry Jr., a homeowner and officer of the Lake Lanier Association, told the Corps last week that "If there were no dams at all, some mussels would die and [the species would] not become extinct. ... Does a couple of mussels trump 5 million people? What I hear from the Corps is that the answer to that is yes."
Together with Lanier, four other federal lakes on the Chattahoochee combine to send water toward the Apalachicola River in Florida, which is formed by the waters of Georgia's Chattahoochee and Flint rivers. But no one knows whether the mussels — the endangered fat threeridge and threatened purple bankclimber — actually need the 3 billion gallons they get every day.
"The real big question is how low can you go to not allow the species to go down the slippery slope of extinction?" said Sandra Tucker, a field supervisor with the wildlife service in Georgia. "Those are things we just really don't know."
But even if the mussels could survive with less water, the coal plant could not, said Lynn Erickson, a Gulf Power spokeswoman. The plant, which opened in 1953 and produces enough electricity to power as many as 19,000 homes, had to lower its water withdrawal pipe on the Apalachicola River about 25 years ago. To go lower probably wouldn't be cost effective, Erickson said.
"This is a small plant in the whole scheme of things," Erickson said. "But it's a critical piece of the whole system." It ensures reliability for an entire region that includes Tallahassee, southeast Alabama and southwest Georgia.
State and regional representatives, including Couch and Georgia's congressional delegation, have been asking the Corps to reconsider its releases for the power plant and the mussels for more than a year. So far, the answer has been no.
"We are required to maintain [the minimum flow]," said Corps spokeswoman Lisa Coghlan. "As we march on, we're going to seriously be looking at our emergency operations and how we provide relief."
The Corps last month predicted Lanier, in the worst-case scenario, could drop another 19 feet by the end of the year to set a new historic low that would threaten metro Atlanta's drinking supply sometime next year.
Mark Crisp, a water expert in Atlanta with the national consulting firm C.H. Guernsey & Co., has said for years that metro Atlanta is asking too much from Lanier. Most of the region's population — and one-third of the state's population — relyon the smallest river basin in the Georgia. In fact, it's the largest metropolitan region in the country depending on a river so small.
As Couch put it, "All our eggs are in one basket."
Now Crisp's warnings seem even more prescient. The active storm season that rescued the state during the last drought — from 1998 to 2002 — is unlikely.
"We're already on the downside of the hurricane season so that hope and a prayer has pretty much gone away," said Crisp, whose clients include customers buying electricity generated at Lanier's Buford Dam. "At this point, as bad as it has gotten, we've got to start thinking about the doomsday, at least saying to each other, 'How are we going to handle it if it comes?'"
Stevens, the ARC's environmental planner, said she "doesn't even want to think about" the fallout if Lanier drops to 31 feet below its full level.
Perdue spokesman Bert Brantley said the state has fought in the tri-state legal water wars and has restricted outdoor watering, with the worst-case scenario in mind.
"The Level 4 declaration is just the latest step in asking Georgians to do their part to conserve as much of our existing resources as possible."
If that's not enough, the first sign of trouble for metro Atlantans could be lowered water pressure, as the water systems strain to pull water out of a dwindling river and lake.
Corps acknowledged mistake
Compounding this year's problem was a huge mistake by the Corps in 2006.
That spring, just as the drought was beginning, the Corps released billions of gallons of additional water from Lanier to the Apalachicola River, for the spawning season of the threatened Gulf sturgeon. So few of the prehistoric fish remain that a federal biologist in Florida has estimated fewer than 10 females are able to spawn in any given year.
The Corps discovered it had relied on a faulty gauge to measure Lanier's level — overestimating the amount of water left in the lake by nearly 2 feet. That meant the Corps had accidentally released 22 billion gallons of water: enough to supply metro Atlanta's needs for about a month and a half.
EPD Director Couch first sent out a warning in June of last year that metro Atlanta's drinking water supply was in jeopardy, thanks to the Corps' releases, which she said were twice the amount needed for the threatened fish. The Corps has since acknowledged it released more water than needed.
That same month, the state sued the Corps, seeking to reduce the amount of water headed across the border to Florida. A flurry of hearings last summer failed to resolve the matter. Florida and Alabama also have complaints about the Corps' management of the Chattahoochee River. A 17-year legal battle is wending its way through the federal courts.
But, even if the courts decide to reduce the releases, and the region is deluged with rain, that may only delay the inevitable, some say, because metro Atlanta is outgrowing its water sources.
'Our culture has to change'
An $8 million water plan for metro Atlanta completed in 2003 is based on the generally accepted assumption that this region can remove an average of 705 million gallons of water a day from Lanier and the upper Chattahoochee. But state officials have long thought that the area won't reach that level of water use until 2030.
Metro Atlanta is already more than halfway there, and over the next 25 years another 1.6 million people are expected to share the water.
And the original assumption was based on some major "ifs:" if additional reservoirs are built; if aggressive conservation measures are enacted; if additional water is pumped from Lake Allatoona to the Chattahoochee basin; if metro Atlanta is allowed to use more of the water in Lanier instead of sending it downstream to Alabama and Florida.
Given the current drought, those underlying assumptions are suspect.
Crisp now estimates metro Atlanta could reach its water limit as early as 2018, assuming continued growth in population.
"Our culture has to change," said Crisp, who lives on Allatoona, which has dropped to levels not often seen at this time of year. "We have been a water-rich region all of our lives, never having to worry about water. ... The attention that is paid to water goes away as soon as we start having rain again.
"We're going to have another drought after this one," he said. "When we can't guess, but we can be assured we'll have another drought that's actually worse than this one. ... With that in mind, our planners have to start looking at this in terms of how many more families, how many more businesses, how many more gallons of water can we allocate out of the Chattahoochee River."
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