“A Twenty-First-Century Catastrophe” - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 177

be able to outbid them. A 2004 initiative to build a state-funded regional reservoir was
defeated. At the same time, local farmers planted thousands of acres of water-intensive
sod to embellish the growing supply of new housing developments, while golf courses
and car washes faced no restrictions on water use during the three-year drought.
“There's no question this situation could have been avoided,” said former governor
Roy Barnes . “We've known this for a long time. We have a state approaching nine milli-
on people … [and] we have no plan for water.”
The Southeastern drought began in late 2005 and lasted through the summer of
2007. Many commentators blamed global warming, which seemed to make sense. But
after carefully reviewing historical climate data, experts concluded that global warming
was not the culprit. In 2009, a team of climate researchers led by Columbia University's
Dr. Richard Seagar (who argues that the Southwest is facing a permanent drying out)
undertook a dispassionate appraisal of the Southeastern drought and discovered that
the three-plus-year dry spell was “quite typical” for the region and will be repeated.
What Atlantans didn't focus on was the second major finding of Seagar's study: “In
the near future, precipitation will increase year around in the Southeast.” This predic-
tion was borne out almost immediately.
In June 2009, Governor Perdue's theatrical prayer for rain was finally answered with
light precipitation, and Atlanta was able to lit water-use restrictions for the first time
in three years. Over the summer, the weather seemed to normalize. Then, on Tuesday,
September 15, a low-pressure system crossed Georgia, collided with a high-pressure
system over the East Coast, and stalled. It began to rain. As the week wore on, the rain
fell harder and then harder still.
On Saturday, September 19, some 3.7 inches of rain fell on the city, which was more
than double the record for that date, while over 5 inches fell on the suburbs. By Monday,
creeks had overtopped their banks. Forty homes were flooded, power was knocked out
across the Atlanta metropolitan area, trees heavy with water crashed to the ground, and
the Red Cross began to evacuate people. It rained for eight days straight. In one seventy-
two-hour stretch, 20 inches of rain fell on parts of Atlanta.
In what seemed like the blink of an eye, fear of drought turned into fear of drowning.
As Atlanta expanded rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, its failure to upgrade its water
system—by building new reservoirs and other water supplies, limiting growth, and
erecting flood defenses—left it vulnerable, first to drought, and then to flood. The
drought baked soils hard, making them unabsorbent; when the deluge of 2009 hit, the
runoff streamed over the hard soil and the acres of concrete and tarmac that had been
laid down, sending storm water crashing through sewers, ditches, and rivers; after eight
days of ceaseless drenching, the soils became so saturated that ponds, creeks, and rivers
overflowed.