Fresh Loaf

For the second consecutive morning, Dekalb County is telling me not to drink tap water without first boiling it for at least three minutes.

To put it mildly, I’m irritated — not just because I can’t drink coffee at home this morning, but because of all the people who, upon waking, don’t read Dekalb County press releases, and who are therefore drinking dirty water this morning.

By my count, this is the second time in just a few weeks that a run-of-the-mill storm has knocked out the county’s supply of clean drinking water.

A water system that fails every time it gets windy is a broken water system.

After I get some caffeine in me, I plan to call Burrell Ellis and Stan Watson, the remaining two candidates for Dekalb County CEO, and ask what they plan to do to fix the problem.

The candidate who promises me potable tap water on a daily basis will get my vote.

Atlanta entrusted one of mankind’s most vital resources to a private French company called United Water way back during the glorious days of Mayor Bill Campbell. It didn’t work out too well.

The rabble rousers at the Fulton County Taxpayers Association have been pushing Mayor Shirley Franklin to take a walk down memory lane and reconsider doing business with the company. They say it would save taxpayers $20 million annually.

If ever there were an example of peace of mind being worth paying for, this is it.

Franklin politely told them no:

In the past several weeks I have received a series of letters requesting that the city renew a relationship with United Water, a private French company that ran the City’s water operations in the late 1990’s through 2002. This request first appeared in a mailing from the Fulton County Taxpayers Association. I write now to explain we are not interested in pursuing your recommendation.

Whew. View the organization’s response to Franklin here.

Good job, one and all.

Atlanta’s Department of Watershed Management reports the city’s business and residential customers used an average of 91.22 million gallons of water a day last month, besting its conservation goal by 7.5 percent. Customers used 17 percent less than the 109.57 million gallons a day slurped in June 2007.

Those wacky bond payments being what they are, expect a token of the city’s appreciation to be included in your next water bill.

First it was Kudzu, then it was Shonen Knife. Now this.

The newest gift from Japan is a car that runs on water. Freshwater, saltwater, rain — it doesn’t matter. One liter of the liquid, researchers say, is enough to power the little mobile for 50 miles in an hour.

Sadly, this doesn’t help us. At least not metro Atlanta. There’s another problem:

“The car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time,” Genepax CEO Kiyoshi Hirasawa told local broadcaster TV Tokyo.

This might work in fueling rental scooters in Panama City Beach, Fla., but inland, the Mayorz hate the bottlez. Add to the fact that amping up production of bottled water to fuel entire fleets of cars would probably offset any environmental gains made if we eased off gasoline. (It takes 17 million barrels of oil every year to manufacture plastic bottles, most of which end up in landfills.)

Please continue with the innovation, Japan. Send us a car that runs on broken promises and Atlanta will be set!

(Toboggan tip to Crooks and Liars, who has a video of the invention.)

Mayor Shirley Franklin has the opportunity this weekend to join the leaders of San Francisco, Chicago, New York City and other cities to encourage a phase-out of bottled water from government use.

A resolution encouraging municipalities to promote its municipal water supply and avoid the overpriced alternative to the tap will be placed before Franklin on Saturday at the U.S. Conference of Mayors annual meeting in Miami. A spokesperson for Franklin says the mayor’s been lobbied heavily on the issue and has yet to make a decision if she will sign the resolution or not.

Corporate Accountability International, a big-business watchdog group, points to the large amounts of waste generated each year by plastic water bottles, the safety of municipal-water systems, and the impact bottled-water manufacturers have on water supplies as why such a resolution would be a good move.

To read the resolution, click here. Click here to read a CL piece about a Dasani plant in Marietta that bottles purified municipal water during a drought.

(Photo by Joeff Davis; illustration by John Yardley)

The American Prospect has an astounding special issue out — that’s available online with bonus articles — about the world’s growing freshwater crisis. The pieces range from the general — the grave threat we face from the dwindling of our most basic resource — to the specific — the oh-so-successful bottled-water industry.

And as is wont with any special issue documenting the missteps of man, Atlanta gets a mention. In a piece about the dangers of privatizing water systems, Wenonah Hunter, executive director of the Food and Water Watch in Washington, D.C., reminds us how well such an experiment worked out for Atlanta in the late 1990s.

Sadly, [French water and wastewater company] Suez and the other water corporations have had a similar record in the United States. United Water, a Suez subsidiary, began a 20-year, $428 million contract in 1999 to operate and manage Atlanta’s water and sewer system. At the time, United Water bragged that “Atlanta for us will be a reference worldwide, a kind of showcase.”

Instead, a fiasco ensued. The company overstated the amount of money it could save the city and underestimated the work needed to maintain and operate the system. In Atlanta, the company cut costs by firing almost 400 employees — half of the utilities staff. United Water tried to add $80 million to the contract and then, after the city refused, inflated billable costs, even billing the city for work it hadn’t performed. It raised sewer rates an average of 12 percent every year it had the contract.

There were other problems, as well. In 2003, the city’s deputy water commissioner told The Atlanta Journal- Constitution, “My biggest concern is a lot of people have lost confidence in the water itself. Over the past year, we’ve had so many boil water advisories and dis-colored water around the system.” Finally fed up with United Water, Atlanta terminated the contract later that year.

Well, better late than never.

Our days of rest are approaching and it’s doubtful the New York Times Magazine will be as cool as it was last week. If you want to bone up on an important issue, I recommend the articles.

(Photo from The American Prospect)

Don’t get all primed to start watering your lawn and washing your car and turning on those yard fountains just yet.

While there’s a feeling we’re out of the danger zone with water, an official with the Army Corps of Engineers told a group in Dawsonville yesterday that Lake Lanier could drop six feet by September if we have the dry summer that everyone is predicting.

According to a story in the Gwinnett Daily Post, the water manager told the Lake Lanier Association that the lake level is expected to drop this summer — the only issue is by how much. That, of course, did not make the Lake Lanier residents very happy.

But Brig. Gen. Joseph Schroedel also gave one of the most succinct, no bullshit statements about the region’s water crisis that we’ve heard:

I feel your pain. Look at how fast the population is growing. We can’t keep leaning on the same system and quadruple the population.”

Anyone in state government paying attention?

The city’s Department of Watershed Management has released its annual Water Quality Report. A cursory glance shows that what’s flowing from your tap is suitable to drink.

From Commissioner Rob Hunter:

“The Water Quality Report continues to show the City’s commitment to clean water,” said Commissioner Rob Hunter. “We are proud of our system and of the employees who work diligently to make sure that we offer drinking water of the exceptional quality that our customers have come to expect.”

The report will be inserted into city water customers’ next bills. To view it before then, click here.

The Fulton Daily Report has a great story on how legal battles between states — such as the long-running brouhaha between Georgia, Florida and Alabama — are becoming more common across the nation.

Kind of.

Mayor Ron Littlefield of Chattanooga is sending down one of his aides — wearing a coonskin cap, of course — with a truckload of bottled water to the Georgia Capitol Wednesday. He’s also declared Feb. 28, 2008 as “Give Our Georgia Friends a Drink Day.”

Click here for more info.

The New York Times weighs in with a hilarious take on state Sen. David Shafer’s and Rep. Harry Geisinger’s twin resolutions calling for the citizens of Georgia to rise up and reclaim our God-given land, dammit.

I may have been a bit harsh Wednesday when I wrote about the General Assembly passing a resolution that called for a commission to investigate whether Georgia was robbed, thanks to the surveying foul-up of a UGA mathematician in 1818, of a claim to the Tennessee River. (Save me your “should’ve used a techie” jokes — this blog is not affiliated with any institute of higher education.)

In fact, yesterday on the Senate floor, after I handed my Creative Loafing card to state Sen. David Shafer, R-Duluth, one of the authors of the border-dispute bills, he said, “Yeah, one of your bloggers was having some fun with my resolution.” He called the post a “nasty-gram,” which I love.

“That was probably him,” said Greg Bluestein, a damn fine chap from the Associated Press who was standing nearby, referring to yours truly.

“Yep, that was me!” I said. “How are ya?”

(more…)

The state House of Representatives followed the Senate’s lead this morning and voted 136-26 to pursue what some say is Georgia’s legal claim to water from the Tennessee River. The drought caused the desperation move, which all dates back to an 1818 surveying error that some legislators say botched the accurate location of where the border between Georgia and Tennessee should lie. The General Assembly also plans to exhume the body of the long-dead surveyor, shoot it into space, and then destroy the corpse with a missile. Kidding!

Damn those surveyors, always reading the latest issue of Hiawassee Gazette to see what covered-wagon racers’ wives were wearing at the Dahlonega 500. If you’re participating in a Civil War re-enactment this weekend, keep your eye on your bayonet. Legislators will be looking for weapons as they sally forth on their quest to reclaim what is rightfully ours! After all, stealin’ sho’ is easier than being responsible.

(Photo courtesy Stock Exchange)

Proving that there is no fighting in the war room, the state Senate huddled up together and unanimously passed a resolution that would effectively make Georgia look like a bunch of fools and piss Tennessee off at the same time.

The resolution, introduced by Sen. David Shafer, R-Duluth, calls for a committee to study whether a 190-year-old surveying error mislabeled the border between the two states, and if so, what legal claims Georgia has to annex it. Why do we suddenly care? Legislators say the error robbed us of access to billions of gallons of rich water flowing through the Tennessee River.

State Rep. Harry Geisinger, R-Roswell, introduced a companion resolution in the House, which has yet to hear a vote. Word around the Capitol and in my gut says that’ll pass just as easily.

So there you have it. Solving the water crisis the General Assembly way: Committee your way into someone else’s land and stick a straw in their river.

Two weeks after Gov. Sonny Perdue’s announcement that local water providers could lift the outdoor watering restrictions in Georgia’s drought-addled counties, many of those spigot guardians were reluctant to do so.

Add the city of Atlanta to that list. At a press conference today, Mayor Shirley Franklin, backed by Robert Hunter, the city’s Department of Watershed Management commissioner, said residents cannot water their brown lawns. Public and private pools, however, can be filled immediately and used during the summer months.

Hunter has said that the exemptions Perdue trotted out — one-person, one-hose watering for 25 minutes a day, three days a week — would be difficult to enforce. The watering restrictions for 61 drought-afflicted counties in North Georgia have been in place since September.

In late October, Perdue ordered all large water users, such as municipalities, utilities and industries, to reduce their water use by 10 percent based on the months of December through March of the previous year. The city initially stumbled out of the gate, but has since met the order. The governor’s mandate still stands, although it lacks any form of penalty to violators. Utilities, by and large the heaviest of water users in the state, are now excluded from the monthly tallies because Carol Couch, director of the state Environmental Protection Division, said they serve a critical function.

More to come on this later, including viewpoints from those who are most affected by the restrictions.