It’s not our fault, says commentary from Georgia

From Athens Online, this commentary, which begins by pointing out that many people are blaming overconsumption and overdevelopment for Atlanta’s water woes, and goes on to say this:

The problem, however, is that the growth and metro Atlanta’s use of the water are not impacting the amount of water. Put simply, it’s Mother Nature: a drought. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers oversees federal reservoirs including Lake Lanier, which supplies most of Atlanta’s drinking water. Brig. Gen. Joseph Schroedel, the corps’ division commander, blames the water shortages on “the lack of inflow” to Lake Lanier as dry weather continues. He adds, “We all must change the way we think about and use our fresh water resources.”

Carol Couch, head of the Environmental Protection Division, reinforces that. “If you were to return all that water today as if metropolitan Atlanta’s demand on the Chattahoochee River did not exist, you would not see a consequential result,” Couch told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Our consumption … is not the cause of the current situation.”

The U.S. Geological Survey’s Web site bears that out. The Chattahoochee’s low flows were lower and more frequent in the first half of the 20th century, before Lake Lanier’s construction (1957). From 1900 to 2006, the number of days the Chattahoochee at West Point flowed at 600 cubic feet per second or less was 179. Of those days, 148, or 83 percent, were before 1960. There were 49 days in 1925, 43 in 1931 and 39 in 1954. And, in fact, of the 85 days with 500 cfs or lower flow on record for West Point, all are before Lake Lanier was built.

Those were some dry years. Which begs the question: Just how did endangered Apalachicola oysters and mussels survive the droughts in the early 1900s, when no one was there to regulate the flow for them? Today the corps, following the law, must release water from Lake Lanier to provide an adequate flow for mussels and sturgeon downstream – never mind that no one has quite ascertained just what equals adequate flow for the critters.

To read the full text of this commentary from Athens Online, click here.

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