Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
viously affected cities and towns like Atlanta and Augusta, where textile mills sitting on
riverbanks and dependent upon local river flows frequently ceased production as water
water flow itself had dropped precariously in 1918 and threatened “a general close down”
of industrial and commercial operations in Augusta because the Stevens Creek hydroelec-
tric dam and other small plants along the Augusta Canal could not generate enough en-
twentieth-century businesses or not providing expectant customers in a major metropolit-
an area with reliable electrical or streetcar service was unsustainable for corporations with
significant capital investments. Geographically isolated nineteenth-century outages only
threatened individual urban-industrial nodes, but the droughts and rolling “blackouts” of
the 1920s presented a broader problem requiring a shift in corporate strategy.
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At the time of the 1925 drought crisis, Georgia Power executives declared that a mere
four weeks' supply of water remained in the Tallulah-Tugaloo project's “giant hydro-elec-
tric reservoirs” of northeast Georgia. Despite claims from company officials in 1920 that
such dams could conserve water supply through “the severest drought,” the 1920s circum-
ating every possible kilowatt of energy from the company's operable hydro facilities and
auxiliary coal plants, Georgia Power in 1925 imported “hundreds of tons of coal … to meet
any emergency which might be caused” if operations exhausted the limited remaining sup-
ply of renewable energy. Georgia officials also discussed the situation with executives from
“textile mills, brick, marble, granite mining and other industries,” and the corporate cus-
tomers agreed to limit their energy use “as much as possible and to operate at nights” for
restrictions in place between August 21 and September 7, and full streetcar service did not
resume for another month.
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