Newsweek discusses Southeast drought issues with Dirk Kempthorne

From Newsweek:

The Chattahoochee River starts as a small but swift stream 3,500 feet above sea level in the mountains of northern Georgia. Flowing south, it cleaves the Georgia-Alabama border before joining the Flint River near the Florida state line. There, it becomes the Apalachicola—watering Atlanta and its neighboring small cities and towns, irrigating farms, hydropowering Florida’s panhandle and most of the state of Alabama—and nourishing the aquaculture of the Gulf of Mexico, some 400 miles from its headwaters, at journey’s end.

Georgia, Alabama and Florida have fought over the water for almost two decades. But as the southeast struggles with the most severe droughts to hit the region in recorded history, the battle has grown intense. There were once 154 boat ramps on giant Lake Lanier; today, there are only two, bogged down in the mud flats. Cities and power companies have been extending their intake pipes deeper and deeper into the river in a desperate bid to maintain flow. Conservation efforts are underway upstream-but they’ll have little impact on the federally-mandated water flow out of Lake Seminole at the intersection of the three states-where 4,750 cubic feet of water a second flows through hydropower turbines for the protection and health of mussels and sturgeon in the Apalachicola Bay. Last month President Bush dispatched his secretary of the Interior to wade into the fray to try to come up with a long-term agreement between the states on how to better manage the water supply. On Monday, Secretary Dirk Kempthorne sat down with Florida Governor Charlie Crist, Alabama Governor Bob Riley and Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue to sort through long-term solutions. The secretary spoke with Newsweek afterwards.

To read what Dirk Kempthorne had to say to Newsweek about the issue, click here.

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