Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The 1950s southern drought, not unlike the 2007 drought and Georgia governor Perdue's
prayer service, replayed the region's old water and power challenges. For decades, southern
boosters sold the New South and Sun Belt by offering up cheap and tractable labor, down-
playing white supremacy, and showcasing bottomless stores of natural resources like water.
Despite their best face, the boosters and politicians discovered that the region's water prob-
lem—like the race and labor conflicts—persisted and was manufactured. After 1945, New
Deal-inspired solutions for public water management encountered stiff resistance from Sun
Belt conservatives and champions of private enterprise. As civil rights and states' rights
politics merged, conservative rights-based ideas influenced conversations about solutions
for the Sun Belt's water challenges in Georgia and South Carolina. The water rights issue
was a real and legitimate concern for rural communities looking to compete in the growing
commercial Sun Belt. Local leaders believed they were entitled to the Savannah River's
water that had always flowed past their communities long before the Corps—a represent-
ative of an unwanted expanding federal power in the 1950s—arrived on the scene. And
neopopulist farmers who opted for farm ponds or to participate in small watershed pro-
jects contributed to limited water supply improvements on their own terms without ceding
physical property to the federal government. In the end, no amount of political backlash or
commercial success could ensure the region's water supplies because social and economic
decisions were not the only factors at play.
Droughts, not unlike floods, influenced the region's economic development and the wa-
terway's environmental future. Massive Corps reservoirs, large utility reservoirs like Ge-
orgia Power's, medium-sized SCS watershed projects, and thousands of small farm ponds
served municipal, industrial, and agricultural constituents. The schemes produced electri-
city, delivered water to industry, reduced flooding down the valley, irrigated fields, became
recreation destinations, and supported domestic animals, fish, and wildlife. Today, Geor-
gia ranks fifth nationally—behind Texas, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma—for the total
number of inventoried dams, with more than 4,600 structures. Collectively, all of these eco-
nomic developments also fundamentally altered the region's hydrologic cycle. Certainly
the Savannah River's watershed was never pristine or unaltered by those who depended on
the basin for survival. However, the scale to which Georgia's watersheds were altered after
1945, and particularly after the 1950s drought, had been unmatched. As one state employ-
ee concluded, “The measurements of low flows made during the drought of 1954 are im-
portant because on many small streams they are probably the only such measurements that
will ever be made under predominantly natural flow conditions during an extreme drought.
Since 1954, the flows of streams in Georgia have become more and more affected by man-
made [
sic
] regulation from innumerable small ponds and by diversions for water supplies
and irrigation.”
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