Metro region’s drought of leadership, vision
And then the rains came.
Good hard rains, day-long rains, that soaked into the earth and have filled streambeds and lakes, turning the North Georgia landscape a shade of green I haven’t seen in years. In fact, parched conditions had come to seem so normal that I had almost forgotten just how lush and wet spring can be in this part of the country.
Or, to express it in more practical terms, water levels at Lake Lanier are just 5 feet below full pool, rising 13 feet since Jan. 1.
However, this is just a temporary reprieve from Mother Nature, not a pardon. According to Aris Georgakakos, director of the Georgia Water Resources Institute at Georgia Tech, serious droughts recur here on a cycle of eight to 10 years. The question is how well we use that time.
The challenge is compounded by the fact that in a highly manipulated watershed such as the Chattahoochee, with dams up and down its course to the sea, droughts can be both natural and man-made.
There’s a very real danger that the effects of the next natural drought could be compounded by decisions made, and not made, by mankind.
In a courtroom in Jacksonville last month, U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson heard oral arguments on a crucial point in the ongoing “water war” between Georgia on one side and Alabama and Florida on the other. The question is whether Buford Dam and Lake Lanier were built in part to provide water to metro Atlanta, or whether that purpose merely evolved over time without congressional approval.
I’ve read the extensive briefs filed by both parties and followed accounts of oral arguments last month, and from a layman’s point of view I would not be surprised if Georgia loses that case. If that happens, the consequences would be serious.
If supplying water to metro Atlanta is not deemed an authorized purpose for Buford Dam, the Corps of Engineers cannot legally store water in Lake Lanier to protect metro Atlanta against the next drought. In effect, the next natural drought would be compounded by a man-made drought, leaving metro Atlanta high and dry.
So far, Georgia leaders haven’t dared contemplate what losing could mean. Among other things, it could shift both the battleground and the combatants in the ongoing water war. A fight that today pits Georgia against its neighboring states could easily turn into a civil war of sorts that pits Georgian against Georgian.
In the recent drought, farmers in the Flint River basin in central and southern Georgia consumed considerably more water irrigating crops than metro Atlantans consumed for municipal and industrial uses. If Georgia is forced to live with a certain allocation of water from the Chattahoochee/Flint/Appalachicola river basin, the water needs of rural Georgia could be pitted against those of their urban upstream neighbors, and that’s a fight no statewide politician would like to see.
Atlanta has been granted a reprieve in another sense as well, although it is at best a silver lining in a very dark cloud. For the moment, growth in metro Atlanta has slowed considerably thanks to the economy. A region that once produced new houses like Detroit produced automobiles now struggles with a Detroit-like recession, with major development companies and banks collapsing.
But like droughts, such things come in cycles. It’s easy to foresee a time a few years from now when development has picked up again and the natural drought cycle begins to reassert itself. And the question of what we have done to prepare ourselves will be all the more important.
In that light, the passivity of Georgia leadership to major challenges continues to confound me. In this case, the apparent strategy is to bet everything on the outcome of a legal fight in which victory is far from certain, with no fallback prepared.
We can only hope that vision and courage are cyclical phenomenon like the rain, and like the rain will appear when we most need them.
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