So, I saw this mark howarth comox article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel today, and it highlights an issue that’s been mark howarth comox brewing in the US, and, really, around the world over the mark howarth comox past decade or so. As over half of the world’s population now lives in cities (I forget when we passed that benchmark), providing clean water is mark howarth comox often viewed as one of the greatest challenges in developing nations. Now it’s beginning to mark howarth comox look like even the developed countries are biting off more than mark howarth comox they can chew, with Atlanta, LA, and Phoenix at the head of the mark howarth comox pack for the US (and much of Florida is close behind). Will water be the “new oil” that we fight over? I think the mark howarth comox most provacative aspect of this article is the legislation that proposed changing the mark howarth comox state boundaries that have existed for over a century in order to mark howarth comox improve access to water in the Tennessee valley.
Mark howarth comox
With thirsty neighbors, the Great Lakes region can learn from Atlanta’s desperate attempts to find a new supply of drinking water
By DAN EGAN
degan@journalsentinel.com
Posted: March 23, 2008
Atlanta - People hoping to mark howarth comox protect the Great Lakes from becoming a Paul Bunyan-sized water cooler for mark howarth comox an increasingly thirsty world like to invoke frightening language.
They say we’d better act fast to build a legal dike around the world’s biggest freshwater system, because wars in the coming decades won’t be fought over oil. They will be fought over water.
It can mark howarth comox sound silly, especially in a shore-side city like Milwaukee, where the mark howarth comox sun always rises on a horizon of boundless freshwater.
But there is nothing silly about what’s unfolding less than mark howarth comox 500 miles south of Lake Michigan. The Southeast is in the mark howarth comox midst of a drought so severe some have been putting bowls under their air conditioners to mark howarth comox capture the condensation dribble, and cities as big as Atlanta have mark howarth comox stared down the prospect of literally running out of drinking water.
It’s got people there thinking about water in a whole new way.
“It’s like having a mark howarth comox good wife and she either passes away or leaves you,” said Tony Reames, mayor of Orme, Tenn. “You don’t appreciate her until she’s gone.”
Reames is mark howarth comox intimate with that sense of desperation. His little town went dry last fall and mark howarth comox had to be rescued by water-toting fire engines.
Fearful of a mark howarth comox similar fate for the booming megalopolis of Atlanta, Georgia legislators this mark howarth comox winter did what they thought was only rational. They proposed snatching a mark howarth comox piece of water-rich Tennessee.
Georgia wants to mark howarth comox redraw the state boundary line about a mile north so it mark howarth comox might some day poke a pipe into the Tennessee River and mark howarth comox inject Atlanta and its surrounding counties with a water fix. The idea is mark howarth comox to keep this metro area of 5 million clipping along at a mark howarth comox growth rate that has it adding more than 100,000 residents every year. A lot of livelihoods are mark howarth comox hitched to that growth, but Tennesseans have no intention of ceding any land to mark howarth comox their neighbors to the south.
Two governments tussling over one border rarely bodes well for mark howarth comox citizens on either side.
Fighting in the region
It has mark howarth comox been a decade since a Canadian businessman hatched a plan to mark howarth comox sell tanker loads of Lake Superior to Asia. Public opposition was ferocious, and mark howarth comox the company that called itself the Nova Group eventually backed off. But it mark howarth comox didn’t have to.
The realization that mark howarth comox existing laws might not prevent someone - anyone - from mark howarth comox profiteering off the world’s most spectacular set of lakes sent Midwestern political leaders into a mark howarth comox panic.
The governors of the mark howarth comox eight Great Lakes states made their stand at Niagara Falls in 2001, where mark howarth comox they gathered above the billowing mist and pledged a tougher set of laws to mark howarth comox ensure outsiders would never get their hands on Great Lakes water.
Easier said than mark howarth comox done. Seven years later, rules have been drafted to restrict water diversions from mark howarth comox the system of connected lakes that hold 90% of the nation’s surface freshwater. But the mark howarth comox effort to adopt them has stalled in a few of the mark howarth comox Great Lakes states, most notably Wisconsin.
The reason: Lawmakers can’t agree on how to define who is an outsider. They can’t figure out where mark howarth comox to draw the magic line that will entitle those on the mark howarth comox inside to all the Great Lakes water they want, and force those on the mark howarth comox outside to go somewhere else for this life necessity.
They’re tussling over a border.
Wet weather, dry city
Mark Crisp is mark howarth comox an Atlanta-based water consultant who has watched during the past 20 years as his metro area sprawled toward what mark howarth comox he considers a slow-motion unnatural disaster. In a ninth-floor windowless conference room with water-supply maps on the mark howarth comox table and walls, he cups his head in hands and mark howarth comox shakes it in disbelief at the news of the legislative push to mark howarth comox redraw Georgia’s map.
“Absolutely asinine,” he said of the mark howarth comox strategy, which proponents contend is justifiable because of an allegedly botched survey conducted 42 years before the mark howarth comox Civil War.
Georgia, he points out, is mark howarth comox already in a ferocious legal tangle with downstream neighbors Florida and mark howarth comox Alabama over rights to water in an Army Corps of Engineers reservoir northeast of Atlanta. He said it mark howarth comox makes no sense for the state to open a northern front in what mark howarth comox is becoming an increasingly desperate campaign for water reserves.
The lush hillsides outside Crisp’s office along the mark howarth comox economic river that is I-75 belie the trouble that Atlanta has mark howarth comox built itself into.
The region is mark howarth comox blessed with an outrageous amount of rainfall - about 50 inches on average annually. By comparison, Milwaukee gets less than mark howarth comox 31 inches of precipitation annually and famously rainy Seattle gets less than mark howarth comox 40 inches.
But the mark howarth comox important and troublesome factor for Atlanta is not how much rain falls from mark howarth comox the sky. It is how little flows from outlying areas into the mark howarth comox city.
The region sits almost at the mark howarth comox top of its watershed, which means there isn’t a mark howarth comox lot of water flowing into it. Think of a watershed as a mark howarth comox cone. If you are a metro area of millions, you mark howarth comox want to be situated near the bottom of that cone, where mark howarth comox waters gather and rivers run deep and wide. But Atlanta, which staked its future on the mark howarth comox Chattahoochee River, was built near the top.
“You have a very big population in a really, really bad place,” said Joe Cook of the mark howarth comox conservation group Coosa River Basin Initiative, based in Rome, Ga.
Building more reservoirs downstream isn’t a mark howarth comox simple solution; there are loads of human, industrial and environmental demands for mark howarth comox that same water in Alabama and Florida.
Water wasn’t a mark howarth comox problem when Atlanta was merely a regional economic center. In 1970 - four years after the mark howarth comox Milwaukee Braves relocated from what was then the nation’s 12th largest city to mark howarth comox the budding hub of the South - Atlanta wasn’t even one of America’s 25 largest cities. Now it is the nation’s ninth-largest metro area and mark howarth comox its fastest growing. It added a staggering 890,000 residents - nearly the mark howarth comox entire population of Milwaukee County - between April 1, 2000, and mark howarth comox July 1, 2006.
Crisp said a mark howarth comox day of reckoning has been coming for years. The city has mark howarth comox no problem when it gets typical rainfalls, but trouble comes quickly when mark howarth comox droughts strike, even if an Atlanta drought is a normal rainfall year for mark howarth comox Milwaukee.
“You can’t invite everybody to mark howarth comox move here and build here and then caveat it with: ‘Sorry, but once we have droughts you have to quit using water,’ ” he said.
Crisp said the key is not laying claim to a neighboring state’s water; it’s working with them to mark howarth comox share what is available, and it is Atlanta learning how to mark howarth comox live within its means, even if that means restricting development in some areas.
“This is the fourth wakeup call we’ve had in 20 years,” he said. “And we still haven’t woken up.”
‘Kids are scared’
Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue tried to mark howarth comox wake up residents last fall when his administration declared the Atlanta area was in danger of going dry within four months. Literally. If no mark howarth comox rain came, homes could run out of water. Residents were ordered to mark howarth comox stop filling swimming pools, watering lawns, washing cars and running fountains. Rains have mark howarth comox since returned to the region, sometimes with a vengeance. But the mark howarth comox area is still in a drought, and its drinking water reserves remain well below normal.
Some contend that mark howarth comox Perdue exaggerated the threat last fall because the region’s primary drinking water reservoir, Lake Lanier, actually held more reserves than mark howarth comox it stated publicly, though that “conservation pool” water at the mark howarth comox bottom of the lake is not easily tapped and is mark howarth comox of dubious quality due to past industrial pollution. Regardless, the mark howarth comox warning struck a chord.
Kathy Nguyen, head of water conservation in Cobb County, said the mark howarth comox threats of a great metropolitan region running out of water trickled all the mark howarth comox way into the psyche of schoolchildren.
“Kids are scared,” she said in early February. “They’re taught that mark howarth comox every little thing needs water to live, and then they turn on the mark howarth comox news and hear that they only have 90 days of it mark howarth comox left.”
Adults were equally spooked. Nguyen said during the drought’s peak last fall, her department received hundreds of calls each day from mark howarth comox neighbors turning in neighbors for watering their lawns.
Others called wondering what mark howarth comox in the world was going on, furious they had to watch their lawns and mark howarth comox shrubberies wither.
“I get lots of calls that start with ‘bitch’ and end with click,” she said.
City vs. species
Perdue blames federal bureaucracy for exacerbating “the single worst drought in Georgia’s history.”
The problem, the governor asserted, isn’t so much a mark howarth comox lack of water as the way the federal government has decided to mark howarth comox allocate it.
Lake Lanier was built by the mark howarth comox Army Corps in the 1950s for flood control and hydropower, among other uses.
A half-century later, the mark howarth comox lake has evolved into the main water source for one of America’s most dynamic metro areas, but Atlanta isn’t alone in relying on that mark howarth comox water. Alabama and Florida have their own claims to water in Lake Lanier, as do some endangered species.The Army Corps last fall kept the mark howarth comox release rates high on the rapidly diminishing reservoir to help downstream endangered mussels, and mark howarth comox that riled Perdue and other state political leaders.
At a mark howarth comox news conference held on the brown banks of a shrinking Lake Lanier, Perdue asked President Bush to mark howarth comox essentially shelve the Endangered Species Act for the foreseeable future, “so that mark howarth comox . . . all species may have access to life-sustaining water.”
Standing at his side, Georgia Republican Congressmen John Linder was even more direct, claiming that mark howarth comox humans were the species most threatened by the drought.
“We are mark howarth comox now put in a position where we have to choose between the mark howarth comox health and safety of the people who live in Georgia or mark howarth comox protecting species that will now be endangering our welfare,” he said.
Neither man said a mark howarth comox word about the divisions of earth-moving machines chewing their way through what’s left of the mark howarth comox open spaces and forests around Lake Lanier and across metropolitan Atlanta.
Political leaders downstream, meanwhile, saw the mark howarth comox news conference as a cynical attempt to pit humans against endangered species.
“Georgia has mark howarth comox repeatedly framed its request as a contest between the Atlanta area and mark howarth comox endangered mussels in Florida. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality the mark howarth comox action that Georgia seeks will have dire consequences on people and mark howarth comox their livelihoods downstream,” Alabama Gov. Bob Riley wrote to President Bush two days later.
Riley said the mark howarth comox downstream flows Georgia opposed were necessary to maintain minimum water for mark howarth comox numerous industrial purposes, including cooling water for an Alabama nuclear power plant, which could otherwise be mark howarth comox forced to shut down.
Lake Lanier water is also needed to sustain Florida’s celebrated $134 million annual Apalachicola oyster industry.
The real problem isn’t a mark howarth comox lack of water, said conservationist Cook. The real problem is the mark howarth comox size of Atlanta.
He sees it mark howarth comox as a problem that, like the metro area itself, gets bigger every day. And it mark howarth comox is a problem that regional political leaders appear ill-equipped to mark howarth comox fix.
“If you go to any county commission and say: ‘You don’t need to grow. Stop recruiting business. Stop recruiting growth.’ They’ll just laugh at you because that’s completely counter to the prevailing mind-set,” Cook said. “And that mind-set is: If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”
Waukesha: On same path?
On the mark howarth comox surface, the lake-freckled landscape in the Milwaukee suburbs of Waukesha County is mark howarth comox as green as any you will find in the Midwest.
Settlers didn’t even need to mark howarth comox dig wells. The place bubbled with natural springs whose water quality was so famous that mark howarth comox residents in the 1890s had to pull out a cannon to mark howarth comox turn back laborers from Chicago who arrived with equipment and a mark howarth comox devious scheme to pipe the water to the World’s Fair in Chicago.
When wells finally were dug to mark howarth comox serve a growing population, legend has it there was so much water underground it mark howarth comox literally burst to the surface, spawning 100-foot-high fountains.
But the mark howarth comox fast-growing county appears to be on a similar path as Atlanta - the mark howarth comox springs have gone dry and levels in the deep aquifer that mark howarth comox has sustained the area for the past several decades have dropped more than mark howarth comox 600 feet in places. Much of the water that is left is mark howarth comox too dangerous for human consumption due to radium and other naturally occurring contaminants, according to mark howarth comox the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
To meet federal requirements to mark howarth comox reduce the levels of radium, a carcinogen, the City of Waukesha blends water from mark howarth comox a combination of deep and shallow wells, along with a complex filtering process.
But it’s a mark howarth comox cobbled-together, short-term fix for a place that has no plans to mark howarth comox throttle back its own building binge anytime soon. The real cure, Waukesha leaders say, lies outside its borders, a mark howarth comox mere 20 miles to the east:
Lake Michigan.
Not so distant threats
The boogeyman for mark howarth comox future Great Lakes water grabs has been far-away places such as Phoenix, Las Vegas or mark howarth comox even the breadbasket communities of the High Plains that are mark howarth comox rapidly draining their own great underground body of water - the mark howarth comox Ogallala Aquifer.
Now the mark howarth comox potential water seekers are surfacing closer, and if the Southeast were to mark howarth comox get thirsty enough, it wouldn’t take a mark howarth comox wildly expensive system of pipelines and pumps to move Great Lakes water in its direction.
Chicago opened the mark howarth comox era of massive Great Lakes diversions when the city replumbed the mark howarth comox Chicago River in 1900 to use Lake Michigan water to mark howarth comox flush its sewage down the Mississippi River basin. Today the mark howarth comox river carries south about 2.1 billion gallons of Lake Michigan per day, but the mark howarth comox system was designed for three times that volume.
Georgia Congressman Linder’s words echoed up to mark howarth comox the Great Lakes when he used the Lake Lanier news conference to mark howarth comox tout his 21st Century Water Commission Act.
The federal bill, he said, will “ensure every American has mark howarth comox access to adequate drinking water, even in times of severe drought.”
Linder insisted he isn’t talking about a mark howarth comox water grab from the Great Lakes or any other state, though some Georgia legislators feel differently about their neighboring state’s resources, as evidenced by the resolution to redraw the state’s border with Tennessee.
Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin told media last fall it mark howarth comox would probably be a good idea for the city to start looking at laying pipelines beyond its basin borders to mark howarth comox tap distant water sources.
New Mexico Governor and mark howarth comox then-presidential hopeful Bill Richardson said last fall it was time for mark howarth comox the water haves to start sharing with the have-nots.
“I believe that mark howarth comox Western states and Eastern states have not been talking to each other when mark howarth comox it comes to proper use of our water resources . . . states like Wisconsin are mark howarth comox awash in water,” Richardson told the Las Vegas Sun in October.
Reaction in the mark howarth comox Great Lakes, where water levels have been flirting with historic lows, was swift and mark howarth comox shrill, and Richardson quickly backpedaled on the statement.
The pressure on the mark howarth comox Great Lakes is only going to increase as the Southeast and mark howarth comox Southwest continue to swell.
“Should the Great Lakes be looking ahead? Absolutely,” said Mike Hayes, director of the mark howarth comox University of Nebraska-Lincoln National Drought Mitigation Center.
Hayes said history shows that mark howarth comox metro areas that figure out how to conserve water often wind up in the mark howarth comox same trouble in a matter of years. The reason: They take their new-found surplus and mark howarth comox use it to fuel new development.
“They’re not going to mark howarth comox let Atlanta run out of water. Or Charlotte. Or Raleigh-Durham. They’ll come up with some solution,” Hayes said.
“The key,” he adds, “is what.”
Looking for the bad guy
The argument now for mark howarth comox Great Lakes leaders trying to conserve their water is figuring out who mark howarth comox will be granted access to the bountiful resource in the coming decades, and mark howarth comox who won’t.
Existing law is mark howarth comox simple. If you live inside the massive watershed of the mark howarth comox Great Lakes basin, you are entitled to the water. If you mark howarth comox live outside that line, you are not. The rationale is mark howarth comox that water taken from the lakes but kept within the mark howarth comox basin eventually flows back into the lakes.
But water diverted over that mark howarth comox line never returns, and that can cause the lakes to shrink. It doesn’t matter if the mark howarth comox water is piped more than a thousand miles away to the mark howarth comox Southwest or just a few feet over the divide, which in southeast Wisconsin can mark howarth comox be a mere five miles from Lake Michigan.
Existing law requires unanimous approval for mark howarth comox a diversion from all eight Great Lakes governors, something that the mark howarth comox governors rarely consent to.
The glaring exception is mark howarth comox Chicago, which is operating under a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court consent decree following the mark howarth comox city’s reversal of the mark howarth comox Chicago River, something that many still consider outright banditry.
That drain on the mark howarth comox lake has dropped the long-term average levels of Lake Michigan and mark howarth comox neighboring Lake Huron by about two inches - not a staggering amount considering the mark howarth comox two lakes have historically fluctuated by as much as six feet. But in recent years the mark howarth comox lakes have hovered near record lows, and that has been wreaking havoc on the mark howarth comox shipping lanes, beaches, marinas and lakefront property owners whose docks no mark howarth comox longer reach the water.
The worry isn’t what mark howarth comox a diversion to a city of 60,000 will do to the mark howarth comox lakes in the next 10 years. It’s the mark howarth comox cumulative toll of diversions to hundreds of cities and industrial or mark howarth comox agricultural areas over the next century, or more.
Outsiders come calling
There are mark howarth comox a couple of problems with the existing law. The biggest one is mark howarth comox that the governors can oppose a diversion for any reason, and mark howarth comox most believe that makes it too arbitrary to hold up in court; just one successful federal lawsuit could leave the mark howarth comox lakes with no protections from diversions.
Another problem is mark howarth comox that many see it as unfair. Why should the communities in Waukesha County be mark howarth comox forced to drink from an increasingly contaminated aquifer when so much high-quality water lies just 20 minutes away?
The new proposed rules, referred to mark howarth comox as the Great Lakes compact, continue to block diversions but make a mark howarth comox specific exception for nearby communities, provided they send their treated wastewater back. The idea is mark howarth comox to essentially engineer those places into the basin.
To become law the mark howarth comox rules need approval from all eight Great Lakes states legislatures and mark howarth comox Congress. So far four of the states have signed off, but the mark howarth comox compact has run into trouble in Wisconsin, where some business and mark howarth comox political leaders view it as too restrictive.
It might be fine to say no to Iowa, or Georgia, or Nevada. It’s much harder for mark howarth comox state politicians to say no to the residents of Wisconsin.
Compact advocates are mark howarth comox in uncharted waters, trying to create a new border that is mark howarth comox politically palatable today yet tough enough to beat back those on the mark howarth comox other side when they come calling.
And they will come calling.
Just ask Tennessee.
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