GBA! TN Town Runs Out of Water

[Brassmask]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/67492

This is America.  Maybe they'll just pull a Simpsons' Springfield and just move the whole little town down the road a ways.   They could always just move to where there IS water, right?  Right, Ami?

...

The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to pass: The water has run out.

The mighty waterfall that fed the mountain hamlet has been reduced to a trickle, and now the creek running through the center of town is dry.

Three days a week, the volunteer fire chief hops in a 1961 fire truck at 5:30 a.m. _ before the school bus blocks the narrow road _ and drives a few miles to an Alabama fire hydrant. He meets with another truck from nearby New Hope, Ala. The two drivers make about a dozen runs back and forth, hauling about 20,000 gallons of water from the hydrant to Orme's tank.

...

[BT]

It's a serious situation. Politicizing the issue doesn't help.

[Amianthus]

They could always just move to where there IS water, right?  Right, Ami?

That is a possibility. How deep is the water table? Are wells feasible? Sounds like they got used to easy water availability and didn't plan for this. Or is someone upstream damming the water flow?

[Brassmask]

They could always just move to where there IS water, right?  Right, Ami?

That is a possibility. How deep is the water table? Are wells feasible? Sounds like they got used to easy water availability and didn't plan for this. Or is someone upstream damming the water flow?

Yes, it's the victims' fault.

[Amianthus]

Yes, it's the victims' fault.

And you think it's who's fault?

[Plane]

I like the rainfall tax that they have in Griffin.

The larger your roof or parking lot and other paved area the more the tax bites you.

The revenue of this tax is supposed to be devoted to public drainage projects , but the tax itself discourages paving any area that you don't need to.

This is, of course, good for the water table.


I want to ask BT how the lake building projects are coming along in his area?

[yellow_crane]

They could always just move to where there IS water, right?  Right, Ami?

That is a possibility. How deep is the water table? Are wells feasible? Sounds like they got used to easy water availability and didn't plan for this. Or is someone upstream damming the water flow?

Yes, it's the victims' fault.

In Florida and in the Atlanta area, the problem of water is not addressed realistically at all unless the ravaging mandarins of growth, the real estate developers, are evaluated for their contribution to the water use problem.

Real estate growth, which continues unabated, is a high buck capitalistic metastasis, and is enabled by laws which are passed which refuse to recognize that while all this is going on, existing real estate could take care of many existing problems, but that would not allow all this churning, big profit building.

Don't look to have Florida address this problem realistically--all the county commissioners in all the counties are completely dominated by high buck developers.  The usual mo is for county commission meetings to conduct normal business during the alloted hours, and then reconvene to have a midnight party with county commissioners, real estate and developement lawyers, and, of course, the godly developers themselves.  There has been two such reportings in my area in the last three months.  No real change is possible, because your normal panhandle blue hair is craven with greed beyond redemption.  This malignant mental reality is kept in check by the clever use of fundamentalist religion suggesting that any umbrage taken regarding all this is communistic as well as satanic, even to bring it up.

[The_Professor]

and so the solution is ?

[BT]

and so the solution is  ?

Conservation, recycling gray water, rain capture and building moratoriums.

[The_Professor]

and more reservoirs and desalination, if close enough to a water source? We simply have not built enoguh desalination plants in this country due to cost issues. But, eventually, one must pay the 'piper.

[BT]

Resevoirs are in the works but what they do is store water that otherwise would go downstream to another jurisdiction so you have squabbles over water rights. Desalination would be good but water systems would need to standardize of treatment methods so that water from one source could be rerouted to a destination in need. Right now water can't safely be shared across county lines if they use different chemical treatments.

[Lanya]

I heard about a town in Georgia where greywater use was prohibited. That needs to change.   
I also heard that we're growing rice and cotton in California, which just floored me. 

[BT]

Imagine a  pristine stream flowing past your house.

Then imagine your upstream neighbors dumping their washing machine suds directly into the stream.

Recycling gray water involves plumbing sink shower and washer water to fill toilet tanks instead of using fresh water to flush.

It can also be used for lawn and garden irrigation where it has a good chance of being filtered before it enters the watershed.

Of corse Fido is one his own.

[The_Professor]

Resevoirs are in the works but what they do is store water that otherwise would go downstream to another jurisdiction so you have squabbles over water rights. Desalination would be good but water systems would need to standardize of treatment methods so that water from one source could be rerouted to a destination in need. Right now water can't safely be shared across county lines if they use different chemical treatments.

So then, is there an international standard for this? If not, one needs to be developed and quickly. If so, then let's all adhere to it.

[BT]

So then, is there an international standard for this? If not, one needs to be developed and quickly. If so, then let's all adhere to it.

There are US (EPA) standards for drinking water quality. How each jurisdiction gets to those standards is up to them.

My town town draws from the Cobb Marietta Water Authority. We could tap into the Fulton County Water supply with a pipe less than 20 feet long. As stated previously, Fulton treats their water differently than Cobb. To ensure compatibility one system or the other would at a minimum have to drain their lines and then refill. And that means hundreds of thousands of people would be without water for days. And then there is the symptom of all the pipe connections that fail when lines are depressurized and then repressurized. It would be a costly undertaking both politically and economically.

But it is something tha needs to happen long term.