Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Epilogue: Water and Power
As 2012 came to a close after two dry years, many Georgia water watchers thought the re-
gion was poised to return to the dry years of 2007 and 2008. Reservoir levels dropped, and
farmers worried once again about the next growing season. According to the U.S. Drought
Monitor, 65 percent of Georgia was somewhere between “severe” and “exceptional” drought
in January 2013. Then the rains came much as they had in 2009 after three years of drought.
By late April 2013, the drought was officially over—and yet the rains kept coming. In the
first six months of 2013, more rain had fallen in many Georgia communities, including the
metro Atlanta region, than had dropped from the clouds in all of 2012.
There were consequences of extreme “weather whiplash”—a term coined by climate sci-
ence writer Andrew Freedman—from drought to flood. A number of earthen dams, some
dating back to the 1930s, failed along the Ogeechee River and upstream of Lake Lanier
in the Chattahoochee River basin. No lives were lost, but sediment flushed downstream
and washed out roads. In the Savannah River basin, the Corps' three major lakes refilled
and began releasing water from flood storage. Neighborhood creeks, community parks and
boat ramps, and homes in the Augusta area flooded before and during the subsequent dam
releases. And the rain kept falling throughout the summer, leaving many farmers with
flooded fields and an expectation for lower yields come harvesttime. Dams, reservoirs,
levees, and ponds built long ago worked double-time throughout the drought-flood whip-
lash period—storing water for consumption, managing floodwaters, and generating electri-
city—much as they have during past whiplash events. 1
Nearly all of the dams and reservoirs conceived by municipal leaders behind the Augusta
Canal and levees, Georgia Power executives at Tallulah Falls, Duke Power's draftsmen in
the Carolina upstate, Corps officers in the upper Savannah River valley, U.S. Department
of Agriculture (USDA) Small Watershed Program leaders, and other engineers across the
Southeast between the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth centuries continue to operate and
function today. The region relies on a vast hydraulic waterscape of artificial lakes, agricul-
tural ponds, working reservoirs, and levees. While this manipulation has replumbed south-
ern waterways to match energy choices and solve water problems, it has also clearly created
new problems.
Water and power, topics common in histories of the American West, have been equally
intertwined throughout the American South's long environmental history. In the antebellum
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