Atlanta Prays for Hurricane

At this point, a sloppy, wet hurricane would be a welcome sight in Atlanta, Georgia. The city has got 3-4 months of water left. Yup. You read right. They're undergoing a drought so bad that if no rain comes (and fall/winter is the dry season down there, so...) then the whole town will be in a major state of emergency.

Right now they're at a level 4, which means extreme conservation measures have been put into place. At issue is the water level in Lake Sidney Lanier, metro Atlanta's main source of water, fed by the Chattahoochee River.

What gets my fires burning is that no one talks about or thinks about conservation until the situation is super dire. They've got 3-4 monhts o fwater left and now they're talking about shutting down car washes, but they're not sure because well, loss of business, etc...Okay, it's a sensitive issue and nobody wants to force workers out of a job, so....put them to work enforcing the new water restrictions!!!! Train car wash workers to do something else and give the business owners a hefty tax break and get them to open up a different kind of business. I mean COME ON.

Water is always an issue. We can't live paycheck to paycheck, so to speak, when it comes to the liquid that sustains life. Nobody should be allowed to water lawns. Ever. Period. End of story. People should landscape their gardens with LOCAL plants and grasses, especially of the drought-resistant variety. Otherwise, your house should sit on a plain old pile of dirt. If nothing will grow there without a hose, then it shouldn't grow there in the first place.

Alright, I could go on an on, but just to prove my point about how nearsighted people are, here are the last two paragraphs from the relevant article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. These should have been the FIRST two sentences:

"Our culture has to change," [...] "We have been a water-rich region all of our lives, never having to worry about water.... The attention that is paid to water goes away as soon as we start having rain again.

"We're going to have another drought after this one," [...] "When we can't guess, but we can be assured we'll have another drought that's actually worse than this one.... With that in mind, our planners have to start looking at this in terms of how many more families, how many more businesses, how many more gallons of water can we allocate out of the Chattahoochee River."

Sources: Truthout.org and ajc.com