Experts: Don’t point your dehydrated fingers at us, neighboring states!
December 21, 2007 at 11:57 am by Thomas Wheatley in NewsWater management a la personal finance:
“You don’t have to be a banker to know that if you spend 75 percent of your savings, and then all of your income, you’ll soon become bankrupt,” said Dan Sheer, a bearded and expressive Maryland hydrologist.
That was the analogy Sheer dropped to illustrate the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ mismanagement of water resources during a meeting yesterday of top water planners and experts at the Atlanta Regional Commission. Sheer, who has been working with King and Spalding, the district’s legal counsel, was one of several speakers who briefed members of the Metropolitan North Georgia Water District on the water-shortage situation as well as an update of the 18-year legal proceedings among Georgia, Florida and Alabama.
And the dominant message of the afternoon was clear: “Don’t blame Atlanta. Blame the Corps.”
According to the speakers at the meeting, metro Atlanta’s consumption is not as chugworthy as our down-South neighbors and Alabama and Florida would like you to believe — they say it’s closer to 1 percent of the entire system. The continued releases, Sheer said, are draining the reservoirs before they can be replenished by inflows.
“This is a problem of management, not consumption,” said Lewis Jones, an attorney with the King and Spalding law firm and the district’s counsel. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jones argued, “acted too defensively and too fast” in March 2006 when Florida threatened the federal agency with a lawsuit, leading the agency to adopt the mandatory releases to sustain downstream levels and flows. And while all this time people have been chiding the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services and those voiceless mussel species downstream, Jones said it was the litigious threats of the Sunshine State that are playing a large role in why Lake Lanier’s levels continue to dwindle.
And the conservation measures metro Atlanta’s been practicing aren’t just for instilling a sense of citizen responsibility, Jones said. He stressed that Georgia’s conduct during the ongoing, multicase litigation will most likely be considered when judges weigh their ruling.
And it’s litigation in which Jones considers Georgia’s strategy mostly defensive. “We’ve got a lot to lose,” he said, “and nothing to gain,” adding that the best-case scenario to come out of the lawsuits would be a court order forcing the Corps to develop a new operating plan. The worst? He didn’t want to speculate.
The Corps’ current reduced releases are set to expire in June. If we see a repeat of our current weather patterns next year, Sheer said, the region is facing an “unacceptable risk of system failure.” The reservoirs will have to play catch-up, and they’ll be 15 percent below ideal levels while doing so. Should the system fail, the bearded man prone to analogies said it would be the worst mismanagement of water resources since “a certain hurricane.” Take a wild guess which one he’s talking about.
Is the Georgia Dome a comfortable place to spend the night?
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