Drought
Posted in Politics by RB on October 18th, 2007 OK, so everyone’s talking about it. I may as well join the crowd. I’ve grown up watching the weather; whenever it rains here my mom says, “I hope we’re getting rain at the farm.” Even my four year old says that now when it rains here. I remember my family weighing the question of whether to buy hay or sell our cows because of the drought in the mid ’80’s. You have to really be from Georgia (and not Atlanta) to remember our debt to the Oklahoma farmers who sold hay to us one summer.
Many months ago an older friend of mine from Moultrie told me that we were in the middle of the first spring time drought in his lifetime. That caught my attention. If he’d never seen a spring drought, then the summer should be horrible. I figured that the state would impose watering bans by June, but it didn’t. Then we got a little rain and I figured that things must not be as bad as I’d first feared. Of course, now we all know it was worse than we imagined.
I’ve read some arguments that Atlanta has grown too large too fast and that it can’t support a large population. But then I think of other large, growing cities such as Las Vegas that have no water and yet somehow manage to continue growing. And of course, plenty of people and politicians are blaming the much maligned Army Corps of Engineers. They’re bound by law, and it is not their responsibility to change that law.
As best as I can tell, there is plenty of blame to go around our local government. For starters, there should have been a partial watering ban in May when we knew the rest of the state was in trouble. And it’s absolutely wrong that contractors paid by state money were watering in new sod on Tuesday. The State should have immediately shut down all excess watering under its control.
What I found interesting in last night’s news, though, is one reason why the Corps has to keep the water levels in the river so high. It’s not just that the mussels need fresh water, but the Corps also has to protect the quality of the water in the river. A ridiculous amount of raw sewage is dumped into the Chattahoochee River every day, and the corps has to ensure enough fresh water is flowing to offset that pollution. I’m generally a very laissez faire person (I usually vote Libertarian), but if what I heard last night is true, then the time has come for industries to be shut down until they can clean up their act. And if that sewage is coming from the city of Atlanta, then my home city (yes, the most important city in the state) should have its water cut off until the sewers are fixed. It is irresponsible for a city to have a double-impact on the resources upon which the rest of the region rely.
