Atlanta Water Situation Called Dire

Metro Atlanta could run out of drinking water in as little as four months according to dire predictions from top water officials on Thursday. [continued]

When you brush your teeth, wet the toothbrush and turn the water off, then turn it on just to rinse your brush and your mouth. With just some common sense millions of gallons of water could be saved every day.

How stupid. Why haven't they started water rationing? Banning watering lawns. People are so wasteful it disgusts me. I see people all of the time turning the faucet on to brush teeth, wash hands, or general cleaning and they have the faucet going full blast while they are walking around doing other things.

When you brush your teeth, wet the toothbrush and turn the water off, then turn it on just to rinse your brush and your mouth. With just some common sense millions of gallons of water could be saved every day.

"If there is no rain, no brown water coming in, we have four months of storage in the entire system to provide the water supply for one-third of the residents of the state of Georgia," said Atlanta Watershed Commissioner Rob Hunter.

It's been an extreme year of drought, and some have said the federal agency that manages the lake has continued with business as usual. The US Army Corps of Engineers releases millions of gallons of water a day from Lake Lanier.

Some of that water stays in Metro Atlanta, but some travels further downstream to Florida and Alabama.

"One of the individuals in Florida said, 'Well, we have a $3 million a year oyster season'," said Jackie Joseph of the Lake Lanier Association. "We have a $5.5 billion economy around this lake."...

...In his letter, Deal questioned why water was still being released from Lake Lanier to help endangered mussels in Florida. The Corps of Engineers said that is required by an endangered species act, and there is not much they can do about that.

The problem is really the drought.

Atlanta tops in population growth
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Atlanta has been the fastest growing metropolitan area in the nation since 2000, with a gain of nearly 900,000 residents to 5.1 million. [continued]

And growth.

Southern Cal could face the same problem, and in fact N and S Cal have fought over the Feather River and other sources for a century.

You and I should start up a desalinization business on the Salton Sea. Land is very cheap there. We could dissociate the water with radio waves generated by the desert sun, burn it back to pure H2O, then sell it to San Diego.

The most severe thing they're doing to people watering their lawns is raising the rates for usage? No wonder they're in such a dire situation! In much less severe droughts than that, I've lived places where they point blank prohibit the use of water for watering lawns or washing cars, and anyone caught doing so faces STEEP fines (and don't think your neighbors wouldn't rat you out if you were the only house on the block with a green lawn and clean cars in front of it).

If they stopped watering their lawns, they'd be violating neighborhood covenants, wouldn't they? In some neighborhoods, your neighbors would be more likely to rat you out for being the only house on the block with a brown lawn in the middle of a drought. We run into the same problems in Colorado Springs and that same argument (limits on watering lawns, etc vs raising rates) comes up every time.

drought, global warming, bird flu, mrsa, or republicans?


Which one is going to bring the downfall to humanity first?