[NYTr] Env - The big thirst; The great American water crisis

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Independent - Nov 15, 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3160632.ece

[Leonard Doyle reports from Chattanooga, Tennessee, on a once-lush
region where the American dream has been reduced to a single
four-letter word: rain]


The big thirst: The great American water crisis

The US drought is now so acute that, in some southern communities, 
the water supply is cut off for 21 hours a day. 

by Leonard Doyle

On Dancing Fern Mountain, in the hills above Chattanooga, Tennessee,
two brothers worry about a beaver dam which is blocking access to the
only fresh water supply for miles. "The dam is ruining the water and
every time we tear it down, the beaver builds it again," says Larry
Fulfer. "People don't think we should, but we're gonna have to get that
critter and kill him."

With a slap of his tail, the beaver disappears. His dam is at the mouth
of a vast underground cave system, where enough pure spring water
emerges to supply the half-a-dozen families who live on Dancing Fern
Mountain. "This drought has turned us into hillbillies," says Larry's
brother, Brian, with evident disgust. "All we want is water in our
taps."

Ten miles away, darkness is falling over the mountain village of Orme
as Tony Reames, the volunteer mayor, drives up a dusty track for an
important nightly ritual. He is turning on the water supply for a
couple of hours.

These days, the plight of the village of Orme makes the national
television news. And as the mayor drives up the hill for half a mile he
is followed by a crocodile of gleaming 4x4s and rental cars, carrying
among them a crew from the Weather Channel, Fox News, ABC News and The
Independent. Under the glare of the television arc lamps, Mayor Reames
solemnly opens the spigot.

It is a daily task that has turned him into a symbol of global warming.
The sight of a small village trying to cope without water for 21 hours
a day has touched something in the national psyche.

A few years ago, Orme, like the rest of the normally lush southeast,
had plenty of water. But a powerful waterfall which supplied the
village has been bone dry for more than two years. Water in the wells
is now sulphurous and undrinkable, thanks to the drought. All around,
the old mining village is surrounded by hills covered in a canopy of
trees, their leaves changing colour in the autumn chill. It is strange
to think of a mountain village running out of water, but the mayor
believes the trees are dying a slow death because there's been a lack
of water for more than two years in a row. "The leaves are later every
year, I don't see how they can survive much longer without rain," he
says.

He takes his role as guardian of the village's meagre water supply very
seriously. At the appointed moment, and with a look of deep
concentration, he turns a 4ft rusty lever, sending water spilling down
the pipes to the village below. All at once householders run showers
and washing machines and collect drinking water. And as Mayor Reames
turns his lever, reporters press their microphones up against the valve
to record the gurgling flow. Then they race down the valley to
interview people doing the washing up.

What they find is a picture of shocking rural poverty. In one clapboard
house, John Anderson is helping out his arthritic mother. He stands
surrounded by jugs of water as camera crews wait in line to ask him
over and over how it feels to have water in the tap for a couple of
hours. "It's been pretty hard all summer," he says, "and it's not
getting any easier."

Three days a week, a volunteer fire chief drives a mile down the road
to the Alabama state line in a 1961 fire truck where he meets another
truck and pumps about 20,000 gallons of water for Orme's tank. As news
of the town's predicament worsens, more and more communities are
offering water. On Tuesday the mayor of another Alabama town came by to
offer as much water as they needed, without charge.

In a couple of weeks' time, relief will come to Orme and its 120
residents when a water pipe is finally connected to a neighbouring
community. Mayor Reames applied for and secured a federal grant to pay
for it. The half-inch pipeline should ensure the continued survival of
the tiny former mining village, which came close to dying thanks to the
worst drought in 100 years.

Many rural communities are suffering as the drought tightens its grip
across a wide region, which includes much of Georgia, Alabama,
Tennessee and Florida. Here in scenic southern Tennessee, the drought
is adding to the problems of extreme rural poverty.

At a highway rest stop for tourists – near a bridge named for Senator
Albert Gore Sr, a Tennesseean and father of Nobel laureate Al Gore Jr
– the toilets are closed for lack of water. In a nearby town, the
mayor orders the grass regularly mown on the exposed banks of a
reservoir that until recently was below water.

>From the air the impact of the drought is most obvious. The mighty
Tennessee and Chattahoochee rivers have been reduced to narrow channels
of muddy brown water. Sandbanks and islands have appeared and old tree
stumps now poke out of lakes and reservoirs as the water level falls.

The government's "drought monitor" says that 32 per cent of the region
is in "exceptional drought", its most severe designation. The first
five months of this year were the driest in 118 years of record-keeping
by the Tennessee Valley authority. And adding to the problem is the
region's booming population, combined with a political culture that
preaches against government regulation and denies the very existence of
global warming. The drought is now hurting Atlanta, a city boasting one
of the worst environmental records in the US and whose political
masters are among the least enlightened when it comes to climate
change. Atlanta is teeming with Fortune 500 companies – including Coca
Cola – and growing rapidly.

But the city's three million residents also endure some of the worst
air quality in the country from poorly regulated smokestack industries.
Thanks to profligate water consumption and drought, they may have no
drinking water at all by January as the city's only source of drinking
water, Lake Lanier, is running critically low. The reservoir's water
must be shared by three neighbouring states. Soon the level will be
lower than when it was built in the 1950s.

On Tuesday, with Bibles and crucifixes held aloft, hundreds of church
ministers, lawmakers, unemployed landscapers and office workers, swayed
and linked arms in a special prayer service for rain outside the
Georgia Capitol. A choir sang "What a Mighty God We Serve" and "Amazing
Grace".

Sonny Perdue, governor of Georgia and chief global warming sceptic, cut
a newly repentant figure as he publicly prayed for a downpour. He even
acknowledged that the drought was a man-made, as well as natural,
problem. Georgians, he said, had not done "all we could do in
conservation".

Then bowing his head, he said: "We have come together, very simply, for
one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully
pray up a storm."

But despite the looming catastrophe, and the publicity surrounding Al
Gore's Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental campaigning, the issue
of global warming gets little consideration in these parts. Georgia's
state assembly recently organised a climate change summit in which
three of the four experts invited were global-warming sceptics.

"It's very backward here," says Patty Durand, head of the Georgia
branch of the Sierra Club, one of the largest environmental groups in
the US. "It also has to do with money as almost all the politicians
here are funded by big polluting industry. There is little awareness of
the environmental impact of industry. In spite of the drought, Georgia
now wants to build a new coal-powered plant that will suck away another
25 million extra gallons of water and pour ever more carbon into the
atmosphere. They just don't get it."

One reason environmentalists give for the state's poor record is
Southern Company, a huge electrical utility that wields huge influence
all the way to the White House. More than any other company, Southern
has been responsible for steering President George Bush away from
action to halt global warming. It has done so by spreading largesse –
$8m (£4m) on contributions to politicians in the past nine years, an
amount far outweighing the political contributions of any other utility.

As a method of controlling US environmental policy, it has proved
highly effective. On Tuesday, voters in Mississippi re-elected
Republican Governor Haley Barbour, a backslapping former lobbyist of
Southern Company. "The White House is not the only one being influenced
by the smokestack crowd," says Frank O' Donnell, head of Clean Air
Watch. He points out that Sonny Perdue has received large campaign
contributions from Southern executives and even hired his chief of
staff from its subsidiary, Georgia Power.

"The company has an unrivalled impact on America's lack of a national
policy on global warming," says Mr O'Donnell, "and the coal-burning
lobby doesn't seem to care much about the general public, so
single-minded is it on building more pollution-creating plants at the
expense of climate change."

After two years of blue skies, entire crops have died in the fields,
and expensive lawns are turning brown thanks to sprinkler bans. The
state's leaders are also bickering, with Mr Perdue threatening to go to
court to reduce the amount of water sent south from Lake Lanier to
Florida. The water flow – here as elsewhere in the US – is managed
by the US Army Corps of Engineers, which releases one billion gallons of
water a day from the lake.

The Army has to provide enough to supply drinking water for Atlanta, to
irrigate crops, cool several coal-fired electricity generating plants
in the US and provide water for industry. It is also obliged by federal
law to ensure enough reaches Florida to keep protected species alive,
including two freshwater mussels and the Florida sturgeon, which are in
danger of extinction.

After a bitter round of arguments between the three states and the Army
this week, the amount of water flowing to Florida's Apalachicola river
was cut by 16 per cent while the Fish and Wildlife Service assesses
whether the mussels will survive.

Governor Perdue may have won round one at the expense of the freshwater
mussel and the sturgeon – but in the absence of prolonged rain, the
region's problems are far from over.

Next week, on Thanksgiving, there will be an even bigger media circus
in the village of Orme as the freshly piped water is finally turned on.
The village will then return to the obscurity to which it has long
grown accustomed since its coalmines closed down in the late 1930s.
"It's real quiet around here and that's how we like it," says Mayor
Reames. "But yet so much has changed. As young boys we used to ride up
to the waterfall on our ponies and take showers in the summertime.
Something dramatic has happened to the climate and it's beyond our
control.

"In a few weeks we will have water here. But what's going to happen to
Atlanta where millions of people are running out of water? What are
they going to do if the rains don't come?"