The Birmingham News reports that Alabama Gov. Bob Riley sent a letter today to President Bush asking him to deny Gov. Sonny Perdue’s recent request that the president halt the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ water releases from Lake Lanier. (Wow, that was a lot of nouns.) Riley says areas of his state were proactive in facing the oncoming water crisis and that shutting off the water would paralyze a nuclear power plant and numerous industries along the Chattahoochee — all of which rely on the resource to run efficiently. He even adds his own number to the countdown-to-doomsday clock currently ticking down to our water crisis. He says Georgia is overstating the severity of the crisis and that Lake Lanier has 260 days of water left, a number he says was confirmed by the Corps last week. That’s more than double the number I was told when I spoke with Maj. Daren Payne of the USACE’s Mobile District.
Click here for Riley’s letter to Bush.
Riley makes the point that Perdue, as of this writing, has not addressed in his talks about the drought:
“Georgia has repeatedly framed its request as a contest between people in the Atlanta area and endangered mussels in Florida. Nothing could be further than the truth….Georgia ignores the fact that the Farley Nuclear Plant sits on the banks of the Chattahoochee River and requires colling water.â€
And the people down in Valdosta? The AJC’s Political Insider reports that those folks think this whole drought crisis, weather aside, is the consequence of the metro area’s penchant for rampant growth.
Here’s a caustic snippet the AJC pulled from an editorial in the Valdosta Times.
Gov. Sonny Perdue’s temper tantrums against the Army Corps of Engineers, the state of Florida and anyone else associated with not giving into his demands continued through the weekend, with meetings at Lake Lanier and declaring northern Georgia a disaster area Saturday to further enforce what everyone else has long known — Atlanta is a greedy, poorly designed behomoth of a city incapable of hearing the word “no†and dealing with it.
The wasteful ways of Atlantans continued through the past decade of severe drought in the state. The water restrictions meant little to them “up there†as they had plenty of water at the time, while rural Georgia and farmers were watching their crops burn in their fields, listening as Atlanta politicians who apparently do think their food originates in a grocery store passed policies designed to prevent them from accessing the water literally beneath their feet.
These same politicians can’t bring themselves to tell their greedy constituents complaining about the low flows in their toilets this week that perhaps if they didn’t have six bathrooms, it might ease the situation a bit. That watering your lawn isn’t as important as watering crops. Or that their greedy overbuilding has taxed their supplies of natural resources beyond their capabilities.
However, all of that requires a degree of common sense and we’ve seen precious little of it from any politician in this state this year. So South Georgia, watch out. What Atlanta wants, Atlanta gets, and right now, they want our water. If our legislative delegation wakes up, perhaps they can have the state agree to at least let us keep what falls from the sky, even while they suck our ground, and our pockets, dry.
