Exceptional Drought – Exceptional Stupidity

As most of you are aware, I am back in Georgia, where I was born and raised, and the big news, as it always is in an agricultural state (yes, GA is an agricultural state, ask anyone but the recent transplants to ATL) is the weather, particularly the rain, of which there hasn’t been enough of here in several years.

More than a quarter of the Southeast is covered by an “exceptional” drought — the National Weather Service’s worst drought category. Georgia is smack in the middle of the affected area, which extends like a dark cloud over most of Tennessee, Alabama and the northern half of Georgia, as well as parts of North and South Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia.

The whole state is a condition of drought (map) with the northern portion of the state recently moved into a “level 4″ drought category, meaning that, well, it means you can’t water your lawn. Almost everything else is exempted, particularly anything that generates tax revenue.

The thing about this drought is that everyone in Georgia’s government is pointing the finger elsewhere, at Alabama, Florida, the Army Corp of Engineers, etc. This is not a sudden crisis. This is an obvious and foreseeable consequence of failing to conserve and inadequate planning for rampant growth in the Atlanta metro.

The lack of planning is everyone’s fault, yes, but the current lack of any positive plan is certainly the fault of Sonny Perdue and the GA Dept of Natural Resources who have point blank said “we don’t have a plan” and they whined about everything that has gone wrong in the last 20 years.

On the other hand, myself among them, some think that the Atlanta situation is a tempest in a teapot; another headline grabbing stunt by Sonny Perdue, who, in his clamoring to get on the news in 2005 in between Hurricanes Katrina and Rita screwed his state out of targeted revenue with no real impact on gas prices with his grandstanding.

The Corps, which manages the water in the region, stresses there’s no reason to think Atlanta will soon run out of water.

“We’re so far away from that, nobody’s doing a contingency plan,” said Major Daren Payne, the deputy commander of the Corps’ Mobile office. “Quite frankly, there’s enough water left to last for months. We’ve got a serious drought, there’s no doubt about it, anytime you deplete your entire storage pool and tap into the reserve.”