If It’s Yellow…

originally published October 3, 2007

(This week’s Pub Notes is written by Flagpole City Editor Ben Emanuel.)

Let it mellow. Give up on your petunias, rat on your sprinkler-happy neighbors, yank your teenager out of the shower, don’t even think about washing your damn car: this is serious. In case you didn’t know, the steadily-worsening drought caused the officials who supply you with drinking water to quit pulling that water out of either the North Oconee River or the Middle Oconee River a couple months ago. Instead, our only water source - with a few days’ exceptions when the river was running (barely) high enough for us to take from it - has been the Bear Creek Reservoir, that multi-county shared source out in Jackson County.

Now, we’re into an unprecedented countdown with maybe six weeks' worth of water allotted to Athens sitting in that reservoir. The reservoir, by the way, is fed by tiny little Bear Creek (which presently is barely running), but is mostly supplied with water via pumps from the Middle Oconee River, just over a hill from the lake. The water engineer guys refer to that kind of set-up as “pump-storage:" you pump from the river when it’s running okay, and store the water in the reservoir for a not-so-rainy day.

Pump-storage was all fine and good until the Middle Oconee got so low (and for so long) we couldn’t pump from it any more, and since then we’ve been drawing down the reservoir while those engineers lose count of their gray hairs. The news as of last week is that the Georgia Environmental Protection Division is probably going to grant us a waiver - they may have, by the time you’re reading this - to pull up to 15 million gallons per day from the Middle Oconee River for 45 days.

Cool, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. I don’t want to know what that poor river’s going to look like, after the summer we’ve had, once we’ve started pumping out of it again. As anybody at City Hall or in the Public Utilities Department will tell you, now is most certainly not the time to lighten up on your water conservation practices. Why? If you ask me, the reason why is that now - more than ever - your impact on the Oconee River is direct and acute, every time you turn on the tap. The river is already below the threshold at which all decent science says we shouldn’t be touching it, and yet you and I and all our friends and neighbors are going to do so anyway.

There are other reasons too, chief among them the fact that EPD is going to be watching us to make sure we don’t abuse the river too badly. They’re going to be asking for evidence that our whole community is conserving water as best it can - from industry to small businesses to homeowners - and they’re going to be checking on the water quality in the river, especially downstream of our Middle Oconee River wastewater treatment plant.

Regardless of our satisfying the requirements of the waiver, we all need to be thinking about the Middle Oconee River: not out of guilt, not out of communion with “nature” (whatever that is), and certainly not out of bewilderment at its inability to continue providing for us - all of us. I just ask that people think about the river - as well as our friends, family and neighbors, and our schools, hospitals and businesses, our whole economy - when we turn on the tap, because our impact on our own local environment is going to be particularly severe until this thing gets better.

What the folks at City Hall are worried about - and what they’re not quite ready to talk about - are the details of how we’re going to share our scarce water among ourselves this fall and winter. The next step of our drought management plan is to start talking “allocation.” That’s when the going gets tough. That’s when the economic impacts get real. To their great credit, our local officials have already been talking to the biggest water users - like the University and the two chicken plants - about how to reduce their use by 20 or 30 percent. They’ve been encouraging us everyday citizens to cut back, too. Depending on how all that works out, though, it won’t be long until the goals for water-use reduction get a lot firmer, and the methods to reach them do, too.

ACC officials have been hard-pressed to say exactly what’s next. The truth is that this drought situation is totally unprecedented, and they’re feeling their way through it as they go. The basic plans are on the books, but implementing them is another question, and it’s not an easy one.

The hope is that the water in the reservoir, plus the river water drawn with the EPD waiver - which should not, by any means, be taken lightly - will get us through the end of the year. For now, that’s the outline for this fall, and we should just be glad there aren’t any home football games in October.

What do we do if it hasn’t started raining by the time winter arrives? You got me.

Ben Emanuel, City Editor

ben@flagpole.com