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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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)

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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)

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…)

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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)

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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.

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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.

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Alabama, Florida and Georgia will not be able to meet the Feb. 15 deadline set by the White House and come to a settlement about how water would be shared among the three states, the Associated Press reports. Officials involved with the talks say they need some more time. From the article:

Officials said the states have made progress in recent months after the president sent Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to mediate a compromise as a record drought threatened Atlanta’s drinking supply. But instead of announcing a long-term pact on Friday as planned, they will offer more of a status report.

“I believe there’s a sincere effort being made,” Kempthorne said Thursday on Capitol Hill before entering a budget hearing. “I am encouraged, but I will keep pushing as well.”

Kempthorne, who said he was briefed on the talks Wednesday night, said he would wait to get details on how close the parties are before deciding whether to set a new deadline. If they remain far apart, he said, he will not.

How much more time do we need, Atlanta? I say, “two weeks,” but that’s just me, and my useless talent to remember classic scenes from Arnold Schwarzenegger films.

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Carol Couch, the director of the state Environmental Protection Division, opened the floodgates yesterday and said that Georgians in the 61 drought-afflicted counties may commence limited outdoor watering once their communities give the green light. Be sure to check if your area has decided to do so.

One person with one hose can water between midnight and 10 a.m. for 25 minutes, three days a week on an odd-and-even-based street address system. If you’ve got newly installed landscaping, you can water on that same system three days a week for 10 weeks after you’ve completed an online Outdoor Water Use Registration Program. It’s free and will be available here March 15.

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From the Only-In-Georgia Department:

The day after the state loses a major federal court ruling that means it cannot draw as much water from Lake Lanier as planned, how does Gov. Sonny Perdue react?

He relaxes the ban on outdoor watering.

OK. We’re going to have less water. So let’s use more of it.

Gotcha.

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From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court has thrown out an agreement that Georgia reached with the Army Corps of Engineers for water rights to Lake Lanier, handing Alabama and Florida a major victory in the states’ years-long water wars.

The agreement, which would give Georgia about a quarter of the lake’s capacity over the coming decades for drinking water, is the foundation of Georgia’s long-term plans.

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Gena Abraham, commissioner of the state Department of Transportation, and Carol Couch, director of the state Environmental Protection Division, spoke today at the South Metro Outlook conference held at the Georgia International Convention Center in College Park. Lots of interesting tidbits, but to aid you, dear reader, I’ve bulleted the eyebrow-raisers of the morning.

• “We have to look at alternate modes of transportation,” Abraham said. “We can not build enough roads and bridges to build ourselves out of this transportation problem.”

Increasing property and construction costs have presented a challenge to the cash-strapped and mismanaged state agency that for years has been known as “the Department of Roads and Bridges,” she said. (Abraham took the reins in December 2007.) While Abraham did not want to jump too far ahead and outline what she thought the metro region needed in terms of transportation fixes, she did say that she would support the findings of the Transit Planning Board. That board is a coalition of MARTA, the Atlanta Regional Commission, the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority and the DOT. View its plans for metro Atlanta here.

• Abraham said that MARTA should be the backbone for the transit system in the state. (I think she meant “city” here. She was speaking about how the transportation dilemma is a statewide problem, affecting Georgia’s ports as well as metro Atlanta congestion. Continued inaction would lead to economic impacts, she said. For example, freight traffic coming from the state’s ports into the metro region would be affected.)

• “Now, about public-private initiatives,” Abraham said. “They are not the panacea. They only cover a portion of these projects. We have to look at alternate modes of transportation in addition to PPIs.” Multiple sources of funding exist, she said, and should be explored and considered. (more…)

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Atlanta — the water-deprived, sprawl-ridden capital of confusion — was selected for a History Channel series about what cities can do in the future to alleviate their major woes, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reports. Eight teams of local designers, architects and planners competed for a chance to win $10,000 and be crowned national champion for the most innovative ideas. Mentioned in the article are Eric Bishop of design firm EDAW — the series’ winner — and Ellen Dunham-Jones, a Georgia Tech professor.

From the article, some of the ideas:

Landscape architect Eric Bishop of winning team EDAW said the city could benefit in the year 2108 by moving its network of streams from the city’s antiquated sewer system back above ground where it could be filtered and cleaned.

…

[Dunham-Jones'] team believed Atlanta’s existing web-like network of freight train rail lines could be used to create a commuter transportation network where high-density development would be built in “nodes” where the lines intersect.

Water could be conserved by separating the city’s stormwater and sewage water, properly treating it and returning stormwater back to the city’s lakes and reservoirs, she said.

Other teams examined building large, multi-story tall “beakers” that would collect rainwater, the creation of deep water wells and pod-like vehicles that would replace cars.

Oh, dear God, no. Weren’t “pod-like vehicles” featured in Logan’s Run? What’s next, futureheads? What other grotesque plans do you have in store for us? Renew! Renew!

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First it’s news that Piedmont Park will be off-limits to festivals this summer. Then it’s word that Atlanta-area swimming pools may not be allowed to use water this summer. Then it’s news that Six Flags may have to shut down its water-based rides.

Now, reports say that if the drought doesn’t ease soon, nuclear power plants across the Southeast could be forced to shut down for the lack of cooling water they need to operate.

Officials don’t expect blackouts, but it would prompt “shockingly high” power bills for consumers because the electricity would have to be purchased from other energy sources.

The ramifications of this drought have only just begun.

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House is still debating the issue.

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The members of the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee wasted no time this morning passing a resolution in support of the statewide comprehensive water plan. The matter’s slated to be scheduled tomorrow in the chamber’s Rules Committee and heard first thing at the start of the session.

Reps. Brian Thomas, Doug McKillip and Debbie Buckner voted against the resolution and plan to file a minority report to ensure it’ll see debate on the floor of the House. McKillip said the amount of power the plan delegates to the state’s executive branch concerns him.

Sources also said Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle has the ability to push the plan in Senate tomorrow.

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In Chattanooga, they’re talking water again: The fact that they have it and we don’t.

And, of course, the speculation that Georgia wants to run a pipeline from the Tennessee River down to Atlanta to give us a boost in water supply. The Chattanooga Times Free Press says no one from Georgia has broached the idea, although Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield said he and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin have talked “more or less about the fact Atlanta is very thirsty.”

But don’t expect much sympathy from our neighbors up north. The paper also includes this quote:

Fred Exum, chief executive of Krystal Co. in Chattanooga, said that piping water to Atlanta would continue “to foster the irresponsible growth that is Atlanta.”

“Drive around down there. You can tell there’s no master plan,” he said. “They just grow and grow and grow.”

Yeah, but, you know, Atlanta’s growth has nothing to do with our drought. Really and truly.

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