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State University of New York Press - Skye Borden

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127 pages

English

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Atlanta is running out of water and is in the midst of a water crisis. Its crumbling infrastructure spews toxic waste and raw sewage into neighboring streams. A tri-state water war between Alabama, Florida, and Georgia has been raging since 1990, with Atlanta caught in the middle; however, the city's problems have been more than a century in the making. In Thirsty City, Skye Borden tells the complete story of how Atlanta's water ran dry. Using detailed historical research, legal analysis, and personal accounts, she explores the evolution of Atlanta's water system as well as charts the poor urban planning decisions that led to the city's current woes. She also uncovers the loopholes in local, state, and federal environmental laws that have enabled urban planners to shirk responsibility for ongoing water quantity and quality problems. From the city's unfortunate location to its present-day debacle, Thirsty City is a fascinating and highly readable account that reveals how Atlanta's quest for water is riddled with shortsighted decisions, unchecked greed, political corruption, and racial animus.
Acknowledgments
Prologue

1. Life before the Chattahoochee

2. Tapping the ‘Hooch

3. Water to the People

4. Taming the Flow

5. Urbanization and Its Discontents

6. Suburban Explosion

7. Urban Decay

8. Water War, Part I

9. Water War, Part II

Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	29 juillet 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438452807
Langue	English

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THIRSTY CITY
THIRSTY
CITY
Politics, Greed, and the Making of Atlanta’s Water Crisis
SKYE BORDEN
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Ryan Morris Marketing by Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Borden, Skye, 1984-
Thirsty city : politics, greed, and the making of Atlanta’s water crisis / Skye Borden.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5279-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Water supply—Management—Georgia—Atlanta. 2. Water consumption—Georgia—Atlanta. 3. Water resources development—Georgia—Atlanta. 4. Atlanta (Ga.)—Economic conditions. 5. Atlanta (Ga.)—Politics and government. 6. Atlanta (Ga.)—Environmental conditions. I. Title.
TD225.A82B67 2014
363.6 109758231—dc23
2013038325
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to Alan Panebaker, who loved the water.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1. Life before the Chattahoochee
2. Tapping the ‘Hooch
3. Water to the People
4. Taming the Flow
5. Urbanization and Its Discontents
6. Suburban Explosion
7. Urban Decay
8. Water War, Part I
9. Water War, Part II
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T his book would not have been possible without the help of so many people. First and foremost, thank you to my husband, James Walter, for loving, supporting, and encouraging me throughout law school and beyond it. And thank you to my wonderfully talented mother, for her kind advice and keen editing eye, and to the rest of my family for believing in me.
I would never have written this book, or even become interested in water law, if it weren’t for the mentorship and teaching of Professor John Echeverria. Thank you, John, for sharing your knowledge with me and for slogging through the first rough drafts of this book. I’d also like to thank the long line of inspiring teachers who led me to find my academic passion, particularly Gene Johnson, Cheryl McKiearnan, and Jon Isham.
Thank you to the librarians at Vermont Law School, especially Christine Ryan and Michelle LaRose, for remaining patient despite my constant interlibrary loan requests and legal research questions. Thank you, as well, to the Auburn University in Montgomery Special Collections Department, the Emory University library staff, and the staff at the Atlanta History Center for curating the historical resources that assisted my research.
Finally, thank you to my editor Michael Rinella, his assistant Rafael Chaiken, Senior Production Editor Ryan Morris, copyeditor Dana Foote, and everyone else at State University of New York Press for their willingness to work with an unpublished author, their interest in the book, and their guidance throughout the entire publishing process.
PROLOGUE
I n its most narrow sense, this book tells the story of Atlanta’s water supply, but in many ways it also tells the story of every major city’s water supply. Some exceptional circumstances do exist in Atlanta’s history, of course. Not many American cities have ever been burned to the ground by enemy troops, and very few urban areas have experienced as much racial tension, suburban sprawl, or rapid growth as the Atlanta metro region. Yet, despite these outlying events, so many of Atlanta’s experiences are reflective of trends shared among the majority of our nation’s largest urban centers.
At every major water law epoch since the city’s inception, Atlanta has contributed in some fundamental way to the nation’s dialogue. After the Civil War, when America engaged in a cleanliness campaign to sanitize urban areas, Atlanta’s blighted slums registered some of the highest mortality rates in the nation. During the New Deal, when the federal government created programs aimed at bringing running water to all American citizens, two Atlanta neighborhoods became the first test sites for America’s slum clearance program. As America waded into the twentieth century’s big dam era, Atlanta moved to the front of the line to receive pork barrel spending. When industrial and municipal pollution threatened America’s waterways, legislators took a tour of Atlanta’s pollution along the Chattahoochee before writing the groundbreaking Clean Water Act. As the nation grew increasingly urbanized and suburbanized, Atlanta experienced the fastest growth in the world and suffered from one of the nation’s worst cases of suburban sprawl.
Unfortunately for Atlanta today, it continues to be at the epicenter of many of America’s current water woes. Like so many others in an era of resource scarcity, Atlanta is embroiled in a multistate water conflict. Alabama, Georgia, and Florida have been fighting over water in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River basin for the past two decades with no end in sight. The legal battle impacts at least 60 percent of the city’s water resources and it has brought uncertainty and scarcity to the region’s water supply.
Like hundreds of other American cities, Atlanta also struggles with century-old water infrastructure. Its drinking water pipes are crumbling with age, and the city’s outdated sewers constantly spew a cocktail of raw sewage and toxic pollutants into Atlanta’s rivers and streams. The city currently faces crippling federal fines and ballooning municipal expenditures as it attempts to upgrade its neglected water system.
To fix its infrastructure problem, Atlanta is spending billions of dollars that it can scarcely afford. In the upcoming years, it will probably spend at least a billion dollars more to construct a water supply sufficient for its growing population. For now, however, Atlanta remains perched on a tightrope between water scarcity and infrastructural calamity, delicately balancing between two equally unpalatable fates. Another drought, another lawsuit, another deadline the EPA refuses to extend—anything could knock the fragile city off its course.
Atlanta is certainly in the midst of a water crisis, and this book is about that, too. The history of Atlanta’s water supply is inherently also the history of its crisis, for the city’s current water problems have been a century in the making and entirely its own doing. Every day, the city confronts the shortcomings of its past miscalculations and indiscretions. Current lawsuits comb through phrases written seventy years ago, and today’s construction crews unearth sewer lines that were last seen during the Roosevelt administration. The city is haunted by the ghosts of its past.
This book starts at the very beginning of Atlanta’s water story. Chapter 1 describes the city’s unlikely origins and offers its unusual topography as a partial explanation for the city’s current fate. Chapter 2 describes the city’s quest to draw water from the Chattahoochee River and its development of the water infrastructure that remains in use today. Chapter 3 tells of Atlanta’s legacy of racial inequality and its effects on the city’s health during Reconstruction and beyond. Chapter 4 describes Atlanta’s quest for a Chattahoochee dam and the city’s ill-fated attempt to avoid paying for it. Chapter 5 details the river’s deplorable condition following Atlanta’s urban growth. Chapter 6 describes the city’s suburbanization and its lingering effects on water quality and water consumption. Chapter 7 analyzes the corruption and graft that contributed to the city’s infrastructural deficiencies. Chapters 8 and 9 fit the pieces of the puzzle together and explain how the cumulative weight of Atlanta’s past actions created the city’s current problems.
In explaining the origins of Atlanta’s crisis, I also hope to provide some insight into the ways in which the city should develop in the future. If its current leaders act with courage and foresight, I believe that Atlanta can avoid recreating the mistakes of its past. For that reason, I conclude with a description of the way in which the city is resolving its current problems. In doing so, I also offer a glimpse into the future problems that may be caused by the city today.
1
LIFE BEFORE THE CHATTAHOOCHEE
A tlanta is, in many ways, an accidental city. It began as just a surveying footnote, and then it grew in a place where no one assumed a city could be. The land around Atlanta was a vast wilderness until 1838, when a major rail line sliced through the region’s dense woods. The future city center began as a small clearing at the end of this line, a junction place where trains filled with coastal plantation cotton met Midwestern wheat-belt freight.
A decade before, Georgia governor William Schley had hired an engineer named Stephen Harriman Long to survey the northern part of the state for a railroad line to connect Georgia’s plantation communities to the Tennessee River. Long immediately packed his bags and headed into the heart of Cherokee count