Assumes the drought continues unabated. Three months from now the water level in the last reservior drops below the level of the input pipes.
What happens when the pipes run dry? Will people be getting their water from trucks in the streets? Is it even logistically possible to supply a city of 5,000,000 people with water on an ad hoc basis?
While your questions may have a factual answer (and thus suitable for GQ), getting there is gonna take time and worthy of debate and opinion suitable for other forums. I’ll contact a mod asking this thread be moved.
In the meantime, perhaps Atlanta is the first major metropolitan area faced with a significant water crisis. I can see Los Angeles and Phoenix suffering from water issues down the road as well.
I’d actually prefer as factual an answer as possible, and I’d prefer that it stay in General Questions, thank you very much. I’ve asked some pretty specific questions and I’d rather this not degerate into a debate about the merits of different approaches to water management.
If the normal water distribution system in Atlanta runs dry, how will the city government get water to the population?
I was just a kid in Dallas during a 7-year drought in the 1950s, but I do remember the reservoirs dropping and the riverbed almost dried up.
Dallas then was a lot smaller than Atlanta is now, but I can see some or all of the following:
Bringing in water from sources farther away (Dallas piped water in from the Red River. It was pretty bad, which led to…)
Drilling deep wells, and trucking in potable water.
Rationing, first voluntary, then mandatory.
Periodic shutoffs, similar to rolling blackouts in the power grid.
The current plan is to have barges in the lakes to pump water over the damn. I tried to find the story on AJC.com but could not find it.
How long will that forstall the city running out completely? Eventually there will be nothing left to pump, right?
About 3 or 4 more months witch will put us into the spring rainy season. No rain next year and I’m moveing. But not to worry day before yesterday the Governor held a prayer vigil for rain so all our problems are solved!
Metro San Juan (pop 1.2million) in 1994 went through a severe water supply crisis that got as far as (a) rolling cutoffs, wherein successively a fraction of the region would be shut down, eventually as far as 12h on/48h off on for some of the branch systems; (b) the water authority trucking in water from other parts of the island or commandeering industrial wells to create neighborhood watering stations . The harsh part of it lasted about a month IIRC. This is however for a city less than 1/4 of Atlanta’s population, where the reservoir levelss did not actually go below all the intakes, and where at least there was still the availability of deep wells where the water may not have been drinking-quality but could be used for other purposes. Fascinating summer, that one. (I remember, in my office we jury-rigged the condensation drain from the AC unit to collect water for the washroom). One thing to consider is that this also screws up the functioning of the water system itself, it’s designed for a certain base flow in order to pump adequately and for the purification/chlorination to work normally – eventually some parts of the system would not be able to get primed/repressurized before the next cutoff, and that neighborhood would be just dry 24/7; also, the water from the pipes was judged not safe to drink w/o boiling for days after the service was restored.
One thing to get clear, that the national media is not telling anyone, only Lake Lanier, the main water source for Gwinnett, Fulton (City of Atlanta), DeKalb, and other counties, is running out in less then 3 months. Some of the other counties in the Atlanta metro area are doing fine. My county, Rockdale, has over 6 months of reserve left in its reservoir, and from what I hear, Henry county has over a year left.
Well as of a month ago, it sounds as though there were no contingency plans in place, just some brainstorming ideas, like piping in water from the Tennessee or Savannah Rivers. None of the ideas floated in that article are things which could be implemented on short notice. (Even if you could magically overcome the political hurdles to tapping the Tennessee River, how long would it take to get a pipeline of adequate size in place?)
I am doing my part by drinking imported beers. (Keep 'em coming, please.) But that can only stave off disaster for so long.
I am really having a hard time imagining a practical, and timely, solution if the taps run dry.
I hope the hell Sonny Perdue is doing more than praying (and bitching at the Army Corps of Engineers). We’ve known for two decades (at least) that this moment would come. It is mind-boggling that there are no plans in place to cope with it.
I’ve got a plan. Let’s steal all the water from Rockdale and Henry counties. I hear they have lots of the stuff.
I think drinking water can be replaced (although with difficulty) using water trucks. The really dangerous problem is fire. During the great ice storm in Montreal area in 1998, the only time I really worried was when the water was turned off for about an hour and a half (of course, we didn’t know that it was a short interruption). Believe it or not, the main pumping stations had no backup power.
That’s a good point. Intown Atlanta is dry as tinder, with lots of old, wood frame houses.
Hari Seldon:
As long as we keep General Sherman away, the city should be fine there.
Unfortunately Cobb county (NW Atlanta) gets its water from Lake Alltoona, which is running out faster than Lanier.
And we have this guy.
Hey, it rained afterward, didn’t it? Quitcher complainin’! Tell him he needs to have one every week!
Why don’t they just open the dam gates? Or is the plan to illegally subvert the Army Corps of Engineers by pumping it atop the dam?
If the city really runs out of water, there’ll be infrastructure problems. Water systems like to be pressurized, and as soon as the city’s not able to maintain pressure, all kinds of things start to go wrong with water systems. Even here where I live, where there’s no such thing as a water shortage and low-flow stuff just pisses us off, we have occasional voluntary don’t-water-you-lawn days because even though there’s plenty of water, there’s sometimes not enough capacity.
Because the water level is going to be below the “dam gates”. At that point opening them up further will just let more air thru.
Note that many of the intake water pipes have their openings at about the same level. The logic was: The water won’t ever get lower than the outlet pipes of the dam. D’Oh.
All the major politicians in the area are incredibly incompetent. No one is actually pushing thru major plans to really do anything at all. They haven’t even put a moratorium on new construction! (One of the major causes of the problem.) When the pipes run dry, they’ll pray harder. There is no Plan B.
At the very least there should be a moratorium on homes built with septic tanks. These homes take water out of the system but don’t put any back. New construction should be on sewer lines only.
:eek: