The
Great American Water Crisis
By Leonard Doyle
16 November, 2007
The
Independent
The
US drought is now so acute that, in some southern communities, the water
supply is cut off for 21 hours a day. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a once-lush
region where the American dream has been reduced to a single four-letter
word: rain.
On Dancing Fern Mountain,
in the hills above Chattanooga, Tennessee, two brothers worry about
a beaver dam which is blocking access to the only fresh water supply
for miles. “The dam is ruining the water and every time we tear
it down, the beaver builds it again,” says Larry Fulfer. “People
don’t think we should, but we’re gonna have to get that
critter and kill him.”
With a slap of his tail,
the beaver disappears. His dam is at the mouth of a vast underground
cave system, where enough pure spring water emerges to supply the half-a-dozen
families who live on Dancing Fern Mountain. “This drought has
turned us into hillbillies,” says Larry’s brother, Brian,
with evident disgust. “All we want is water in our taps.”
Ten miles away, darkness
is falling over the mountain village of Orme as Tony Reames, the volunteer
mayor, drives up a dusty track for an important nightly ritual. He is
turning on the water supply for a couple of hours.
These days, the plight of
the village of Orme makes the national television news. And as the mayor
drives up the hill for half a mile he is followed by a crocodile of
gleaming 4×4s and rental cars, carrying among them a crew from
the Weather Channel, Fox News, ABC News and The Independent. Under the
glare of the television arc lamps, Mayor Reames solemnly opens the spigot.
It is a daily task that has
turned him into a symbol of global warming. The sight of a small village
trying to cope without water for 21 hours a day has touched something
in the national psyche.
A few years ago, Orme, like
the rest of the normally lush southeast, had plenty of water. But a
powerful waterfall which supplied the village has been bone dry for
more than two years. Water in the wells is now sulphurous and undrinkable,
thanks to the drought. All around, the old mining village is surrounded
by hills covered in a canopy of trees, their leaves changing colour
in the autumn chill. It is strange to think of a mountain village running
out of water, but the mayor believes the trees are dying a slow death
because there’s been a lack of water for more than two years in
a row. “The leaves are later every year, I don’t see how
they can survive much longer without rain,” he says.
He takes his role as guardian
of the village’s meagre water supply very seriously. At the appointed
moment, and with a look of deep concentration, he turns a 4ft rusty
lever, sending water spilling down the pipes to the village below. All
at once householders run showers and washing machines and collect drinking
water. And as Mayor Reames turns his lever, reporters press their microphones
up against the valve to record the gurgling flow. Then they race down
the valley to interview people doing the washing up.
What they find is a picture
of shocking rural poverty. In one clapboard house, John Anderson is
helping out his arthritic mother. He stands surrounded by jugs of water
as camera crews wait in line to ask him over and over how it feels to
have water in the tap for a couple of hours. “It’s been
pretty hard all summer,” he says, “and it’s not getting
any easier.”
Three days a week, a volunteer
fire chief drives a mile down the road to the Alabama state line in
a 1961 fire truck where he meets another truck and pumps about 20,000
gallons of water for Orme’s tank. As news of the town’s
predicament worsens, more and more communities are offering water. On
Tuesday the mayor of another Alabama town came by to offer as much water
as they needed, without charge.
In a couple of weeks’
time, relief will come to Orme and its 120 residents when a water pipe
is finally connected to a neighbouring community. Mayor Reames applied
for and secured a federal grant to pay for it. The half-inch pipeline
should ensure the continued survival of the tiny former mining village,
which came close to dying thanks to the worst drought in 100 years.
Many rural communities are
suffering as the drought tightens its grip across a wide region, which
includes much of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida. Here in scenic
southern Tennessee, the drought is adding to the problems of extreme
rural poverty.
At a highway rest stop for
tourists - near a bridge named for Senator Albert Gore Sr, a Tennesseean
and father of Nobel laureate Al Gore Jr - the toilets are closed for
lack of water. In a nearby town, the mayor orders the grass regularly
mown on the exposed banks of a reservoir that until recently was below
water.
From the air the impact of
the drought is most obvious. The mighty Tennessee and Chattahoochee
rivers have been reduced to narrow channels of muddy brown water. Sandbanks
and islands have appeared and old tree stumps now poke out of lakes
and reservoirs as the water level falls.
The government’s “drought
monitor” says that 32 per cent of the region is in “exceptional
drought”, its most severe designation. The first five months of
this year were the driest in 118 years of record-keeping by the Tennessee
Valley authority. And adding to the problem is the region’s booming
population, combined with a political culture that preaches against
government regulation and denies the very existence of global warming.
The drought is now hurting Atlanta, a city boasting one of the worst
environmental records in the US and whose political masters are among
the least enlightened when it comes to climate change. Atlanta is teeming
with Fortune 500 companies - including Coca Cola - and growing rapidly.
But the city’s three
million residents also endure some of the worst air quality in the country
from poorly regulated smokestack industries. Thanks to profligate water
consumption and drought, they may have no drinking water at all by January
as the city’s only source of drinking water, Lake Lanier, is running
critically low. The reservoir’s water must be shared by three
neighbouring states. Soon the level will be lower than when it was built
in the 1950s.
On Tuesday, with Bibles and
crucifixes held aloft, hundreds of church ministers, lawmakers, unemployed
landscapers and office workers, swayed and linked arms in a special
prayer service for rain outside the Georgia Capitol. A choir sang “What
a Mighty God We Serve” and “Amazing Grace”.
Sonny Perdue, governor of
Georgia and chief global warming sceptic, cut a newly repentant figure
as he publicly prayed for a downpour. He even acknowledged that the
drought was a man-made, as well as natural, problem. Georgians, he said,
had not done “all we could do in conservation”.
Then bowing his head, he
said: “We have come together, very simply, for one reason and
one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm.”
But despite the looming catastrophe,
and the publicity surrounding Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize for
his environmental campaigning, the issue of global warming gets little
consideration in these parts. Georgia’s state assembly recently
organised a climate change summit in which three of the four experts
invited were global-warming sceptics.
“It’s very backward
here,” says Patty Durand, head of the Georgia branch of the Sierra
Club, one of the largest environmental groups in the US. “It also
has to do with money as almost all the politicians here are funded by
big polluting industry. There is little awareness of the environmental
impact of industry. In spite of the drought, Georgia now wants to build
a new coal-powered plant that will suck away another 25 million extra
gallons of water and pour ever more carbon into the atmosphere. They
just don’t get it.”
One reason environmentalists
give for the state’s poor record is Southern Company, a huge electrical
utility that wields huge influence all the way to the White House. More
than any other company, Southern has been responsible for steering President
George Bush away from action to halt global warming. It has done so
by spreading largesse - $8m (£4m) on contributions to politicians
in the past nine years, an amount far outweighing the political contributions
of any other utility.
As a method of controlling
US environmental policy, it has proved highly effective. On Tuesday,
voters in Mississippi re-elected Republican Governor Haley Barbour,
a backslapping former lobbyist of Southern Company. “The White
House is not the only one being influenced by the smokestack crowd,”
says Frank O’ Donnell, head of Clean Air Watch. He points out
that Sonny Perdue has received large campaign contributions from Southern
executives and even hired his chief of staff from its subsidiary, Georgia
Power.
“The company has an
unrivalled impact on America’s lack of a national policy on global
warming,” says Mr O’Donnell, “and the coal-burning
lobby doesn’t seem to care much about the general public, so single-minded
is it on building more pollution-creating plants at the expense of climate
change.”
After two years of blue skies,
entire crops have died in the fields, and expensive lawns are turning
brown thanks to sprinkler bans. The state’s leaders are also bickering,
with Mr Perdue threatening to go to court to reduce the amount of water
sent south from Lake Lanier to Florida. The water flow - here as elsewhere
in the US - is managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, which releases
one billion gallons of water a day from the lake.
The Army has to provide enough
to supply drinking water for Atlanta, to irrigate crops, cool several
coal-fired electricity generating plants in the US and provide water
for industry. It is also obliged by federal law to ensure enough reaches
Florida to keep protected species alive, including two freshwater mussels
and the Florida sturgeon, which are in danger of extinction.
After a bitter round of arguments
between the three states and the Army this week, the amount of water
flowing to Florida’s Apalachicola river was cut by 16 per cent
while the Fish and Wildlife Service assesses whether the mussels will
survive.
Governor Perdue may have
won round one at the expense of the freshwater mussel and the sturgeon
- but in the absence of prolonged rain, the region’s problems
are far from over.
Next week, on Thanksgiving,
there will be an even bigger media circus in the village of Orme as
the freshly piped water is finally turned on. The village will then
return to the obscurity to which it has long grown accustomed since
its coalmines closed down in the late 1930s. “It’s real
quiet around here and that’s how we like it,” says Mayor
Reames. “But yet so much has changed. As young boys we used to
ride up to the waterfall on our ponies and take showers in the summertime.
Something dramatic has happened to the climate and it’s beyond
our control.
“In a few weeks we
will have water here. But what’s going to happen to Atlanta where
millions of people are running out of water? What are they going to
do if the rains don’t come?”
© 2007 The Independent
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