If the water goes
Georgia Governor Sonny Purdue has declared a state of emergency in Georgia and has asked President Bush to declare the 85 counties in the north half of Georgia a federal disaster area due to lack of rain.
Many people around us have been counting down the days until the water will be too low to reach the municipal pipes that pull from it. Around the same time, the water level will be too low for power plants to pull the necessary water for steam production. The last I heard, we were 41 days from arriving at that scary point, though the AJC says we have 2.5 months.
We live in the middle of the biggest city in the area affected by this drought. This situation scares us; we take it seriously. I sent a letter to the homeowners I work with giving them ways to conserve water as we went into a total outside watering ban a few weeks ago. I’m also planning a class with Southface Energy Institute to teach our homeowners about how to make rain barrels (for what little rain we are getting) and about how to reuse graywater. I hope that will be enough; I hope this drought will scare Georgians (Dan and me included) into being more careful with how we use water, and then we’ll get a reprieve from the drought and stick with being more careful. (One county near us has managed to cut their water consumption by 20%.) Wishful thinking, maybe? I fear that if/when we get past this drought, people will go back to very wasteful practices, Georgia will–due to climate change–get less water, and the state’s population will continue to soar, making extreme drought a consistent issue for the state’s future.
To be honest with you, we don’t feel assured of a good outcome at this point–not in the long term, but not in the short term either. If water in the pipe system in Atlanta fails, and especially if that is accompanied by electrical brownouts, it wouldn’t surprise either one of us if we get riots in Atlanta. Many people lose the societal veneer of being nice to others in catastrophes, and 4 million people simultaneously losing the ability to drink a glass of water, cook dinner, take a shower, and flush the toilet is a catastrophe. Throw in electrical failures, and we see a major problem potentially looming.
Dan and I—in idle moments we have in the car, or while we are having dinner—have been discussing at what point we leave if things continue to get worse. Dan can do his work anywhere, and I can take a leave from my job (or even move and get a new job) if we have to. Some part of me feels like that is cowardly, like we should stay and . . . do what, though? We have no water source to offer, and life would mostly shut down here without water in the metro area. We would just be part of a bad problem if we stayed–more people to drain resources, more people to save. At what point do we make a decision to leave? What do we pack if we go? Where do we go if we leave? Those are the primary questions we’ve been discussing about this issue. Fortunately, we have enough money in reserves that we could make it financially until we got on our feet somewhere else, though it would likely drain our resources. . . . We don’t want to be alarmist, but we don’t want to be foolish, either. As I told Dan, many of us in the U.S. have this idea that truly big, bad things won’t happen to us, but if Katrina taught us anything, it should be that we’re not immune to major disasters. And, as Katrina also showed, relying on the government to organize and see us through may not be the best policy.