Lake Lanier water going, going …

November 23, 2009 by Ken Edelstein
Filed under: SMART GROWTH 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is moving forward with work on its court-ordered plan to deny metro Atlanta water from Lake Lanier, even as Gov. Perdue’s Water Task Force met at the Governor’s Mansion today to come up with alternatives to Lanier’s water.

Georgia Public Broadcasting reports that the Corps “has started to rewrite the manual it uses to control water flows in the Chattahoochee river basin.” A federal judge ruled earlier this year that the Army had never actually been authorized to allow the Atlanta region to use Lanier’s water and must come up with a plan to send the lake’s water downstream as soon as 2012.

Perdue appointed the 80-member task force to come up with a contingency plan in case the state can’t work out a deal with Alabama and Florida to get a share of the water. Environmentalists fear that the business-dominated panel will emphasize the construction of costly reservoirs,

Read the rest of this post at MyGreenATL.

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Comments

3 Comments on Lake Lanier water going, going …

  1. HistoryJoe on Tue, 24th Nov 2009 12:20 am

    2. I’m not a lawyer, but I carefully studied the 90+ page judge’s ruling back in the fall and one of the required uses of the dam is to generate power. That ensures a pretty steady flow of water down the river to Atlanta’s intake on the Chattahoochee just upstream of Peachtree Creek, which is perfectly legal. I believe the problem is the straws stuck directly into Lake Lanier: Gainesville and Buford are OK but Gwinnett county (which recently got an expensive upgrade) is illegal. As far as I could tell they are the only ones effected by this ruling. Fresh-water mussels in Florida are also not a protected use of Lanier water.

  2. Ken Edelstein on Tue, 24th Nov 2009 10:57 am

    3. I believe that’s correct, HistoryJoe. It might have been helpful for me to have made the distinction clearer. Gwinnett’s particularly at risk because almost all its water comes from Lanier. I haven’t done enough reporting on this to understand how it might affect downstream jurisdictions, especially the city. If anyone’s familiar with this, please add to the discussion.

  3. R Walker on Tue, 24th Nov 2009 1:45 pm

    4. Wouldn’t the simplest solution be for Gwinnett to pull water from the river instead of the lake? That has to be cheaper than building a new resovoir. The whole thing smells to me.

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