What Is Goin’ On?

Doug Wilson is the Exective Director of the Georgia Water Planning and Policy Center (GWPPC). If you have never heard of GWPPC, you probably aren’t alone. Formed in 1999 with the support of the Georgia General Assembly and the Georgia Research Alliance, GWPPC serves as a think-tank on water in Georgia.

Although the GWPPC is not involved in rule making, it is contracted with the Legislative Services Committee and the Georgia Department of Agriculture to advise them on the recently proposed “Water Plan.” It has also produced about 80 white papers dealing with various water issues, all of which can be found on its website.

Water is not just a Metro Atlanta issue or problem. Not only has Georgia’s population almost doubled since 1970, but its irrigated agricultural acreage has also increased by 1 million acres since 1970.

Consider this: Seminole, Early, Decatur, Miller, Baker and Mitchell Counties have between 400,000 and 500,000 irrigated acres of agricultural lands. Spring Creek in Early and Seminole County is dry.

Most of the water used in South Georgia comes from the Floridan Aquifer which extends roughly on a line from Blakely to Screven County. In the Albany area the aquifer lies very close to the surface and is recharged quickly when it rains. In Southeast Georgia the aquifer lies deeper and it takes longer for surface water run-off to recharge it. In Savannah and other coastal areas, heavy industrial use of aquifer water has caused episodes of saltwater intrusion into the aquifer, something that is to be prevented at all costs. This impacts commercial and industrial development because of restrictions on the amount of water that can be pumped from the aquifer.

As you may know, Lake Lanier is under the control of the Army Corps of Engineers and was originally built primarily for the production of hydroelectric power. Its use as a source of drinking water came much later, I guess when population growth made it a necessity to find new sources of available water.

When there is no drought, Georgia is all wet, about 50 inches of rainfall over the whole state each year. That 50 inches of rain equals 50 trillion gallons of water. Demand for all types of water consumption in the state is about 1.2 trillion gallons a year, and a lot of that, particularly in South Georgia, is satisfied from ground water. Thus, if we could just catch and hold more rainwater, we could have all the water we could possibly need without depriving people who live downstream of their need for surface water in the rivers and creeks.

We might even need a reservoir or two for South Georgia to use in times of drought when rivers and streams are low.

With the supply of available water growing low in Metro Atlanta, Governor Perdue and others have criticized the Army Corps of Engineers for releasing water from Lake Lanier, water that could be used by Atlantans. But it isn’t the mussels and fish living in the waters of South West Georgia and Florida that are to blame. This is well explained in a recent Op-Ed by Dusty Nix, writing for the Editorial Board of the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. While the drought has brought the problem home, the real reason Atlanta is in such dire straits is poor planning and unrestrained development that everyone has known for years was going to result in this kind of shortage someday.

The truth is that Atlanta’s water consumption is at its absolute maximum and the drought has only served to emphasize this fact. If no more water were released and the drought continues, Atlanta is still going to be out of water in the not too distant future.