A taste of things to come in the management of Georgia’s water resources may be evident in the federal lawsuit filed over the role of Lake Allatoona as a source of drinking water for metro Atlanta.
The lawsuit rekindles a host of issues including: Gov. Nathan Deal’s plan to build or expand water reservoirs; water conservation efforts; and the federal government’s pending Water Control Manual for the Chattahoochee River system.
A proposal that could increase the number of hogs farmed in Georgia is drawing criticism from environmentalists concerned about hog excrement.
Hogs produce a lot of waste – about four times that of a human. The current practice for handling hog waste on industrial-scale farms is to store it in earthen basins, called lagoons, until it can be sprayed on surrounding lands.
The concerns raised by the Georgia Water Coalition involve the handling of this amount of waste in this manner. They point to the experience in North Carolina, where heavy rains from a hurricane in 1999 caused lagoons to flood and fail, spreading millions of gallons of hog waste that found its way into rivers and private water wells.
Georgia has resumed its offer to Tennessee to take a piece of the Tennessee River in order to resolve a border dispute, but this year’s proposal is far more modest than a plan offered in 2008.
The current proposal appears to seek just a small bite of Tennessee, a smidgeon just big enough to give Georgia a shoreline along the Tennessee River. Just enough shoreline to do provide a footing for, say, a new pipe to be sunk into the river to draw water into Georgia.
