Drought

ABC News recently carried a story on its website about how Celine Dion’s estate-under-construction in Florida consumed 6.5 million gallons of water last year, despite a drought in the southeast, despite the strain South Florida’s freshwater supply, and despite the fact that Celine doesn’t even live there.

Included in the article was this bit of trivia:

Experts estimate that at least 50 percent of Florida’s water is used for landscaping.

Fifty percent?!

I’m not a fan of seeking regulatory or legislative involvement to govern personal behavior or the enjoyment of one’s private property…but I’m finding hard not to think that some folks up in Tallahassee might want to start looking into what could be done in that regard.

A couple of blogs I follow have mentioned that the May issue of Popular Mechanics includes a feature called, “10 Pieces of U.S. Infrastructure We Must Fix Now”. I’ve seen the feature mentioned in the context of Atlanta’s water shortage, but the entire list is actually rather interesting to me (not surprising, given my interests):

• Circle Interchange, Chicago
   
• Brooklyn Bridge Approaches, New York City
   
• Industrial Canal Locks, New Orleans
  (Ships can wait 36 hours for clearance to transit, creating a drag on the efficiency of the Port of New Orleans. PM doesn’t mention that survivors of the Lower Ninth Ward would like to see the canal itself fixed by being filled in….)
   
• Atlanta’s water system
  (PM estimates 18% of the daily water consumption in ATL is the result of leaky water mains)
   
• Alaskan Way viaduct, Seattle
   
• Lake Okeechobee dike, Florida
   
• Dover Bridge, Bonner County, Idaho
  (Northern Idaho bridge for US95, scores 2 out of a possible 100 in sufficiency rating.)
   
• Wolf Creek Dam, Kentucky
  (Kentucky River dam deemed in enough danger of collapse that TVA reduced the water level behind it, to reduce flood risk to downstream towns, including Nashville.)
   
• Sacramento River levees, California
  (Remind me not to write flood cover on the Arco Arena, or on SMF.)
   
• O’Hare

None of those are surprises, and many of them are slated for repairs in the next few years, assuming funding remains available. However, it’s nice to be reminded every once in a while of some neglected priorities.

(How much money have Presidential candidates raised to date for this election cycle?)

I’ve written previously about Georgia’s desire to annex part of southeastern Tennessee to gain access to water in the Tennessee River, to alleviate pressure arising from poor planning prior to the drought.

The AJC has an article on what seems to be a more realistic solution—make nice with the feds, who actually own the plot of land Georgia really covets:

Georgia, though, could launch another legal attack. Federal land — not controlled by Tennessee — lies between Georgia and the river. The Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal agency that manages the river, owns the half-mile slice of largely untrammeled property separating Dade County, Ga., from the river.

TVA policy allows adjacent landowners to cross its property to reach the Tennessee River. Georgia, conceivably, could bypass a spat with the state by dealing directly with the federal government.

There are years of environmental bureaucracy that must be satisfied before such a plan could come to fruition, and of course Volunteer pride is still ruffled over the idea of Tennessee water going to alleviate Georgia’s lack of resource management. (Have Vols started patrolling Nickajack in their bass boats, I wonder?)

But at least this seems far more realistic than a TN-GA border war.

Seen in the Chattanoogan:

The mayor has officially proclaimed Feb. 27, 2008, as “Give our Georgia Friends a Drink Day.” The proclamation comes as a result of the Georgia Legislature passing a joint resolution that seeks to pursue reestablishing the boundary between Georgia and Tennessee.

The truck load of bottled water along with the proclamation will be delivered to the Georgia Legislature Wednesday morning.

“Please know that we are willing to help our neighbors to the south with this complimentary truck load of water,” said Mayor Littlefield. “And along with this water, we want to send Georgia legislators a message that focusing on conservation efforts would be much more productive than an ill-conceived land and water grab.”

Just when I had written off plans for Georgia to push their border a half-mile further north as the sort of weird bill one normally sees introduced at the start of a state legislative session, there’s this story from the AJC:

Last week, the House and Senate passed separate measures requiring the state of Georgia to revisit its longstanding border dispute with Tennessee. The legislation was immediately pronounced an international punchline. The state Senate encouraged the giggles by singing a round of “This Land Is My Land” prior to unanimous passage.

But don’t be fooled. The people involved in this are looking at a water shortage, exacerbated by drought, that could jeopardize thousands of billions of dollars in development over the next 50 years. A wet state grows, a dry one stagnates — and the competition with neighbors is fearsome.

Sponsors of the legislation are as serious as a heart attack.

“I don’t think it’s a gimmick,” Perdue told reporters a few hours after his computer demonstration. But the enthusiasm the governor showed in the basement had shifted to a diplomatic practicality.

“I think we have to be very careful in the way we proceed in this effort. As it gets more and more serious, the people of Tennessee get more and more concerned. There was probably a better way to do this — legislation’s a sort of in-your-face sort of thing,” the governor said.

I heard a rumor that Vols and Vandy fans have set aside intrastate rivalries, and are now patrolling the Nickajack Reservoir in a flotilla of bass boats.

The AJC also provides readers access to an 18-page memorandum entitled Tapping the Tennessee (1.8 meg pdf, converted from the AJC’s .doc format document) which goes into more detail about the history of the claim.

In my two visits to Las Vegas, I have been somewhat disturbed by the excesses of The Strip, including just how much water is wasted in the Nevada desert.

Maybe the days of such excess are numbered.

From Reuters:

The study by two researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego calculates a 10 percent chance that Lake Mead will run dry in six years and a 50 percent probability it will be gone by 2021 absent other changes.[...]

The uncertainty about when and if the lake will run dry stems from the natural fluctuations of the Colorado River, which feeds the lake, the researcher said. In recent months the flow has been above average, he said, after years below average.

I wonder if Las Vegas will begin to race Los Angeles, to see which metro area can tap Lake Tahoe first.

For those in the Southeast who might be anxious about the world coming to an end thanks to the drought, perhaps a story in Sunday’s Sydney morning Herald might offer some hope:

As at 9am yesterday, Sydney had received a whopping 172.4 millimetres since the start of February, compared with 4.4 millimetres for the same period last year.[...]

La Niña, the opposite of the drought-causing El Niño, causes extensive cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. On the east coast, that equates to wetter weather.

Sydney’s dams are at 64 per cent of capacity, up 3 per cent in just a week. The water supply was at an all-time low at just 33.9 per cent in February last year. Sydney’s main water supply, Warragamba Dam, is 25 per cent fuller than it was at this time last year, at almost 58 per cent.[...]

Releasing the latest drought figures yesterday, Mr Iemma said large areas of western NSW had moved out of drought for the first time in seven years.

I’ve been reading Eric Flynt’s 1812: The Rivers of War an alternate-history fictional retelling of events during the War of 1812 in which the antics of some land-grabbing Georgians play a role.

So I was oddly amused to hear about current real-world antics of land- (and water-) grabbing Georgians. From the Tennesseean:

A resolution in Georgia’s legislature proposes to move the Tennessee-Georgia boundary about a mile to the north of where it now lies[...] The proposal elicited instant ridicule from residents of the area on Thursday, as well as tongue-in-cheek saber rattling from Tennessee lawmakers.

One state senator offered to settle the issue with a football game. Another suggested floating an armada of University of Tennessee fans down the Tennessee River to defend the state’s territory.

But behind the amusement is a serious issue that has bedeviled the Southeast: access to water. If the border is redrawn, the new state line would fall across Nickajack Reservoir. That would allow parched Georgians to tap into the waters of the dammed Tennessee River.[...]

The resolution, which has passed early hurdles but has not received final passage, claims that the boundary was erroneously surveyed in 1818 and that Georgia has never accepted it. The resolution calls for the creation of a “Georgia-Tennessee Boundary Line Commission” that would perform joint surveys and change the line to the “definite and true” boundary line: exactly following the 35th parallel.

Of course, it should be remembered that while Tennessee’s border was supposed to be set at the 35th parallel, 19th century surveyors were notoriously inaccurate about identifying the precise location of that line of latitude. If memory serves, the Tennessee State Constitution which includes a definition of the borders of the state, avoids specifying a specific line of latitude.

Why, even the famous intersection of 35° North, 90° West (famous to me, at least, since my bedroom growing up was precisely on 90° West) is a couple of miles inside Tennessee.

In case you’re wondering (and because I want to test out a modification to how I do the “Highway Feature of the Week” on this site), here’s a Google Maps view of the Alabama-Georgia-Tennessee tripoint, which shows just how close the border is to the reservoir in question:

One of the things I miss from when I lived in southern Alabama was just how cheap electricity was. Perhaps soon folks in that part of the country will also have similar feelings. From the AJC:

Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

Utility officials say such shutdowns probably wouldn’t result in blackouts. But they could lead to shockingly higher electric bills for millions of Southerners, because the region’s utilities may be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other energy companies.

One thing I wonder, however—in other parts of the country, the grid is already strained. Perhaps there is sufficient generation capacity…but I thought there were issues with finding sufficient transmission capacity.

Time to encourage additional PV-installations, I suppose.

Seen in the Orlando Sentinel:

Several fast-growing northeast Florida communities could tap into the Atlantic Ocean for drinking water by anchoring a desalination ship 2½ miles off the coast.

If completed, the floating water factory could become the first major ocean-desalination system in the United States. The idea is to retrofit an oil tanker with filters and powerful pumps that would make up to 25 million gallons of drinking water a day, enough for more than 150,000 people.[...]

Without the ocean option, the communities may have to draw from the more fragile St. Johns River, now the focus of a budding water-rights battle between Orlando, Jacksonville and cities in between.

Desalination is already relatively common in the Middle East and Australia, but it hasn’t caught on to any great extent in the U.S. due to the expense. Population growing beyond the availability of groundwater to support it, aggravated by drought, is apparently shifting the balance.

The apparent reason for building the plant offshore is to reduce expense (no need to build both the intake and exhaust pipelines, if the plant is already where it would want to exhaust to), as well as perhaps to address cat risk (when a hurricane approaches, the plant can disconnect and steam out of harm’s way).

Of course, I can’t help but think that if the expense is a big concern, they could always bottle the desalinated water, slap a fancy label on the stuff, and sell it as a premium bottled beverage. Considering how much Americans are willing to pay for bottled water….