Drought in Georgia more menacing, but it gets less mention

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: … The rains still haven’t come. Lake Lanier drops ever lower. And Georgia’s water wars with Florida and Alabama slog along. Yet last fall’s doomsday water scenarios have disappeared from newspaper front pages and state officials’ lips. Instead, this fall, Georgians are consumed with the financial crisis, the presidential election and gas prices.

Meanwhile, the new year promises Year Four of the drought that has fundamentally affected the way North Georgians live. “In any of the discussions about the election, what are you hearing about water?” Sam Olens, chairman of the Atlanta Regional Commission, asked last week. “There’s a malaise, an indifference, a feeling that we’ll wake up one day and Lake Lanier will be full.”

Last fall, Gov. Sonny Perdue declared a state of emergency and banned virtually all outdoor watering. He also ordered North Georgia to reduce water usage by 10 percent. Some success ensued. North Georgians used 18 percent less water in September than they did a year earlier, according to Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division.

Still, Lake Lanier, the region’s main water source, is 18 feet below full pool —- a dangerously low level for a reservoir of water that downstream Georgia, Florida and Alabama also covet. David Stooksbury, the state’s climatologist, said that most of North Georgia’s stream, river and lake levels have dropped below last year’s already anemic levels.

“We’re in the throes of a drought that’s never been seen in history,” Jack Dozier, executive director of the Georgia Association of Water Professionals, said during Wednesday’s 2008 Cobb County Development Symposium. “And it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”….

Perdue pledged, and later rescinded due to the state’s budget troubles, $40 million to expedite reservoir construction. But that was a paltry sum, according to Olens, considering that the nearly complete Hickory Log Creek Dam and Reservoir in Canton cost $100 million. Cobb County is covering three-fourths of the cost and will receive a comparable percentage of the reservoir’s water. “There’s total denial from the state’s perspective. They clearly don’t think we have a water problem,” said Olens, also chairman of the Cobb County Commission. “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to sit here and talk about a water plan that isn’t.”....

Lake Lanier at River Forks Park in Gainesville, Georgia, taken in December 2007 by Mike Gonzalez, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2