Anatomy of a panic: Atlanta running out of water

by Alex Evans | Oct 23, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, North America

Here’s a story that seems to have gone virtually unremarked outside the US. Atlanta is running out of water: not in some long term “by 2050” kind of way, but in about 75 days’ time. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it in an article on 11 October,

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.

As the New York Times observed over the weekend, “the response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion”. The drought afflicting Georgia has been underway for more than a year. Yet:

All summer … fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow.

Atlanta’s waking up to to the juggernaut bearing down on it, as the lakes on which it depends – Lake Lanier and Allatoona Lake – sink lower and lower, has been sudden. On September 28, Couch ordered an immediate ban on all outdoor water use, the most severe step laid out in state drought plans – but warned as she did so that, “my calculation is it may be inadequate”. She would be “reaching out”, she went on, to the US Army Corps of Engineers, to lobby for more water to be released from corps-run lakes (of which Lake Lanier is one).

By October 11, the full extent of the problem – including the fact that only three months’ worth of water remained, in the face of a forecast for another dry, warm winter – was becoming clear. Couch and her officials began drawing up a more demanding crisis plan to figure out where the pain should land. Couch commented at the time, “there has to be a balance between determining how much water we can conserve against how much lost jobs and lost economy there is. You don’t do that lightly.”

Then, on Friday last week – with drinking water down to 80 days – Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue staked out his position: it’s not our fault. Carol Couch’s attempts to “reach out” to the Corps of Engineers had been met by a blunt refusal, based on federally mandated protection for mussels and sturgeon downstream in the Sunshine State. The governor’s office claimed bitterly that “the amount of water the corps sends downstream is about double what Mother Nature would provide to federally protected mussels living in Florida’s Apalachicola River”, and promptly sued the Corps. (Even the local paper conceded on its editorial page, “Let’s be honest: It’s not about the mussels. The struggle for control of water flowing down the drought-stricken Chattahoochee River is about money and politics and human frailties such as jealousy, greed, laziness and procrastination.”) On Saturday, as the story went national, the Governor declared a state of emergency for more than half the state, and requested federal assistance.

Yet as the New York Times observed, “these last-minute measures belie a history of inaction in Georgia and across the South when it comes to managing and conserving water, even in the face of rapid growth”. As Mark Crisp, a water expert in the Atlanta office of engineering firm CH Guernsey commented, “we have made it clear to the planners and executive management of this state for years that we may very well be on the verge of a systemwide emergency”.

True and necessary as such statements of tough love may be, they are of scant consolation to the people of Georgia – who, as Katie Couric’s flagship news program on CBS reported yesterday, are feeling “rising panic”:

Across North Georgia, thousands of people are digging private wells, nervous that their regular water’s about to run dry. “The phone is just ringing off the hook,” said Bob Askew, the owner of a well-drilling company. “It’s like working at a telethon or something.”

So here comes another test of urban resilience – and one that emphatically illustrates the importance of futures and horizon scanning (as well as the fact that in the US, when you need a scapegoat for your incompetent water management, you can always blame the Corps of Engineers). And as a thoughtful feature in the NYT magazine on Sunday suggests, that what’s happening in Atlanta may well be a preview of coming attractions:

A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California.

An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”