Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
flooding, improve navigation, and facilitate the transport of timber from inland sources to
coastal markets. Urban boosters, corporations, politicians, and fall-line citizens in Augusta,
Milledgeville, Macon, Albany, Columbus, and Rome all depended on the Savannah, Ocon-
ee, Ocmulgee, Flint, Chattahoochee, and Coosa Rivers to grow and prosper. Life changed
during the famous New South period (1890-1930). Georgians depended increasingly on
railroads, but the ridgeline occupants never hid their affection for river basins. For ex-
ample, recall a Georgia Power Company predecessor that built six hydroelectric dams
in the upper reaches of the Savannah River basin. From these northeast Georgia facilit-
ies—built between 1910 and 1927 and still operating today—the company channeled elec-
tricity ninety miles south over high-tension transmission lines to Atlanta. Georgia Power
also built new coal plants, including Plant Atkinson (1930), on the Chattahoochee to power
Atlanta by an organic and mineral energy mix. All of these energy-generation facilit-
ies—the renewable and the fossil fuel systems—depended on water, and all were inter-
connected via transmission lines. These “networks of power,” to borrow historian of tech-
nology Thomas Hughes's phrase, furnished Atlanta's busy bees with electricity and what
were considered modern conveniences in the 1920s: Street lights and electric fans gained
popularity, but electric streetcars and factories captured the lion's share from this versatile
hydraulic waterscape.
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The Southeast's hydraulic waterscape and environmental history provide a perspective
for future decisions. Nearly all of the region's cities, regardless of their geography or size,
have depended on river basins and shared water supplies for a long time. Federal agen-
cies may control the Chattahoochee River's floodgates at Buford Dam and other facilities,
but ridgeline corporations—including those that participated in the 2009 Georgia Water
Contingency Task Force—all have a vested interest in making sure there is enough clean
water in the ACF river basin, the Savannah River, and other valleys across the Southeast.
If history is a guide, these corporations are not mere players on the ridgelines; they trans-
formed the energy of many rivers in many states into a variety of agricultural products,
industrial hard goods, and services in the past, and they are as focused today on secur-
ing clean water for tomorrow. Finally, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida have been mired in
tristate water skirmishes for more than two decades. If Georgia's leadership continues to
avoid a resolution with Alabama and Florida, other regions might begin to look more ap-
pealing for investors.
By running away from a tristate compact for decades, Georgia's leadership has pulled the
state and region into a trap. There is an old western adage that water flows uphill to money,
that is, from the Colorado River to California's irrigated fields and municipal water pipes.
Georgians and their neighbors learned their own version of this maxim when they figured
out how to turn water into electricity at hydroelectric dams and coal-fired power plants and
then transmit energy to an urban-industrial Piedmont built atop a withering cotton South. In
