A Keystone Dam and Georgia’s New Ocean - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 62

abnormal electric power requirements of defense plants” scattered across the southeast and
connected by long-distance electrical transmission lines, “but also because of one of the
most prolonged and excessive droughts this section has experienced in many years.” 5
The “crisis” intensified before it abated. The Georgia Power Company's executives pre-
pared customers for a draconian plan because conservation had “ to work at once ,” since
water levels in the company's Tallulah-Tugaloo project's six artificial reservoirs continued
to drop. In Lake Burton alone, the water level had plummeted more than sixty feet be-
low the normal summer level. “Only heavy, widespread, protracted rains” could “correct
this condition,” since the periodic “afternoon's thundershowers won't raise the level of the
great storage lake appreciably.” 6 The Chattahoochee River's flows were so diminished that
Atlanta's municipal water managers had to channel the diminished flow directly to the in-
takes. And Georgia Power Company technicians reduced operations at the coal-fired Plant
Atkinson. 7 Environmental conditions and an urban drought once again compromised the
quality of life for Atlanta's residents (population 302,288). 8
Eventually, the region pulled out of the crisis for two reasons. First, the Southeast's and
the nation's interconnected electrical transmission grid pooled power “from all directions”
to save southern electric customers—much as it had in 1925. Second, what amounted to a
multiyear drought in north Georgia ended in the spring of 1942 when the rain began to fall
across the Blue Ridge Mountains. The parched Peach State received an average of 43.10
inches of precipitation in 1941, while 1942 recorded an average total of 52.34 inches. The
sought-after rain replenished the dry Chattahoochee and Savannah River watersheds and
busted the drought of 1941. 9
After a half-century of New South boosters' rhetoric that sold the region to industrial
developers predicated on an abundance of water and cheap energy, how could the region
still lack adequate water supplies? And given that recent history, how would post-World
War II planners approach water management and energy production differently to avoid fu-
ture resource rationing? The post-1945 hydraulic waterscapes needed retooling to survive
the cyclical and dramatic drought and flood events. For New South capitalists, the an-
swer—massive artificial reservoirs—became the Sun Belt's preferred method of taking
federal dollars while maintaining acceptable environmental and social conditions. Southern
water problems, both cultural and natural, continued to function as barriers to growth and
as pathways to power.
The New Deal big dam consensus resurfaced after 1945. Proponents—namely, prom-
inent southern Democrats—lobbied for multiple-purpose dams and an enhanced hydraulic
system. But the rules of the game had changed. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) ex-
periment had run its course and would never be repeated again. As the United States and
its Allies anticipated victory over fascism in Europe, Congress replaced New Deal liberal-
ism—and the social and employment programs that defined it—with a more conservative