How to solve America's water problems

Jan. 7, 2008 | As his state endures its worst drought in a century, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue is praying for rain. Lake Lanier, the reservoir that waters the endlessly growing colossus of metro Atlanta, is receding from its banks, shriveling to a shiny puddle. Georgia has restricted car washing and lawn watering. It has shut off its outdoor fountains.

In San Diego, which just experienced its driest summer in recorded history, the hills are charred from October's wildfires. The state of California is so tapped out that the pumps that carry water from the Sacramento River to San Diego were tightened in December. Water authorities are urging San Diegans to tear up their grass and replace it with cactus and succulent.

Bill Richardson, governor of arid New Mexico, had his region's plight in mind when he told the Las Vegas Sun that Northern states need to start sharing their water: "I want a national water policy. We need a dialogue between states to deal with issues like water conservation, water reuse technology, water delivery and water production. States like Wisconsin are awash in water."

Sun Belters, there's a man in Detroit with the answer to your water problems. "They can have all the water they want," says Hugh McDiarmid Jr. of the Michigan Environmental Council. "All they have to do is move here." There's plenty of room. Some Detroit neighborhoods are so bereft of houses that pheasants hide in the vacant lots. And the cost of living is unbeatable. Earlier this year, an auctioneer was trying to unload a bungalow for $18,000. When no one would bid, he reminded his audience, "You get the land under the house, too."

OK, so Detroit's a tough place to find a job. How about Cleveland? It's half the size it used to be, which means 500,000 people are driving on freeways built for a million. Commuting is a breeze. Syracuse would love to have you, too. They've lost a higher proportion of young people than any other city in the U.S., perhaps because they engineered their own demise, being the headquarters of Carrier Air Conditioning, the appliance that made the Sun Belt possible. But they still have Syracuse Orange basketball. And Dinosaur Barbecue, which has the best ribs in Upstate New York, and the funniest bathroom graffiti anywhere.

Move to any of these primed-for-turnaround urban gems, and you'll be living alongside 6 quadrillion gallons of water. That's nearly 20 percent of the surface fresh water on Earth. You can wash your car in the driveway. You can douse your lawn with a sprinkler. You can even have a swimming pool, although you'll only be able to use it four months out of the year. And think of all the energy we'd save by moving the people to the water, instead of moving water to the people.

The South needs water. The Midwest need people. Maybe it's time we work something out.

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For the last half-century, the Great Lakes states have been on the losing end of a migration that would have baffled our nomadic ancestors. Ignoring thousands of years of prophetic wisdom, from Moses to Sam Kinison, Americans have been moving away from fresh water and into the desert. In the most recent Census Bureau survey, the two fastest-growing states -- Nevada and Arizona -- were two of the driest. Michigan and New York, states awash in water, actually lost people. Some of these migrants were looking for work, following factory jobs down South. But others just couldn't stand the gloomy Northern winters.

Now, those cold-weather refugees are discovering that the climate that's so well-suited to year-round golf is not so well-suited to providing millions of people with life's most essential element: H. Two. Oh.

Atlanta and San Diego are full of ex-Yankees who wouldn't shiver through another Lake Erie blizzard if you gave them a free house and a lifetime supply of rock salt. Both are prototypical Sun Belt cities -- they're warm and sunny and owe their enormous growth to the car and the air conditioner. They're also running short of water, and as a result, they're suffering the political, personal and environmental disturbances that are part of life in a parched metropolis: lawsuits over resources, restrictions on car washing and lawn sprinklers, and disruptions of the natural cycles of overdrawn rivers.

Atlanta was the first American metropolis that didn't begin its life as a port. It started as a rail terminus. The railroads were built along ridges, so the city straddles the Eastern Continental Divide, which separates water flowing to the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Its elevation is among the highest of cities east of Denver. Water flows away from Atlanta. But people flow toward it. Thanks to its semi-tropical climate and its image as a progressive Southern city, the metro area's population has doubled since 1980.

Metro Atlanta draws its water from Lake Lanier, a dammed-up stretch of the Chattahoochee River. The Chattahoochee forms part of Georgia's boundary with Alabama, then joins the Flint River to become the Apalachicola, which flows through the Florida Panhandle. The more Atlanta drinks, the less flows downstream. Since this year's drought began, Lake Lanier has shrunk to 15 feet below its normal level, its all-time low. As it withers, Georgia, Florida and Alabama have been bickering over the remaining supply.

"What's created the water crisis in Georgia is Atlanta," declares Joe Cook, of the Coosa River Basin Initiative in Rome, Ga. "There's no other major metropolitan area in the country that has to rely on a smaller watershed than Atlanta. It's a horrible place for 4 million people based on the water resources that are available. It can be argued that Atlanta is beyond the number of people it can support."

Atlanta suffered a drought in the 1980s, but that was over a million people ago, so Lake Lanier held enough water to go around.

In October, the Army Corps of Engineers announced plans to release Lake Lanier water into the Apalachicola, where it was needed to protect endangered mussel and sturgeon. Gov. Perdue sought a court order to hold onto the water, accusing the federal government of "making an ill-advised choice in favor of mussel and sturgeon species over Georgia citizens." (The governor withdrew the request after the Corps agreed to cut the flow by 16 percent.)

Next page: In the West, it's the end of an era