Are We In For A Local Water War?

I’m not much of a hellfire and brimstone type, but I firmly believe that wasting water will end you up in hell. 

Of all the ways humanity has advanced, figuring out clean water on demand is by far the most important to our health and comfort — and ought never be taken for granted. Maybe there are bigger sins than leaving the sink on full blast to heat for the dishes or singing show tunes in the shower for 45 minutes, but not in my house. No need to flush after every little pee-pee, and don’t even think about running a half-loaded dishwasher! 

Millions of people on the planet have to spend hours a day finding fresh water, I scold the aquatically extravagant people I live with, which perhaps sounds like the old parenting cliché about eating your veggies because “children are starving in Africa.” 

It’s questionable logic that mindful water usage on a single family level might not directly help dig a well in India, but it’s important to remember just how blessed we are to have a constant flow of water any ol’ time we want to wash our clothes or make a pot of tea. The systems of regulation we depend on for water safety and convenience may be mostly invisible. But should they break down, life gets very bad, very fast — and it happens closer to home than we think. Just ask the folks in Flint, Michigan or Jackson, Mississippi, who are still boiling what comes out of their pipes.

I developed my water vigilance growing in the Arizona desert, where ongoing drought and sprawling development necessitate careful monitoring, and caps on resources recently caused one tony neighborhood to run dry altogether. Somehow none of this applies to the Phoenix area’s hundreds of golf courses, where it’s completely fine to pour billions of gallons into patches of scorched ground to keep the links green all year round.

Here in coastal Georgia, it seems like our problem is too much water, as in storm-flooded streets and squishy socks on humid days. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have our water issues. 

As a matter of fact, Savannah was literally ground zero for water regulation in America: In the 1970s, consumer advocate and OG disruptor Ralph Nader and a group of students known as “Nader’s Raiders” investigated levels of pollution in the Savannah River, uncovering a massive ecological disaster caused by unchecked chemical dumping from the local paper mill. The published report, The Water Lords, forced the mill — called Union Camp back then and acquired by International Paper in 1999 — to quit stinking up the river and helped garner support for the Clean Water Act of 1972.  

While it’s stayed in compliance with subsequent protection laws and conservation efforts (you can read the company’s most recent Sustainability Report here), International Paper continues to loom over our local water supply. According to a 2018 study, the mill is one of the largest groundwater users in coastal Georgia, sucking millions of pristine gallons a day from the Floridan Aquifer. This underground bounty of fresh water supposedly supplies Savannah homes as well, though we’re all over here drinking treated river water at least part of the time.

Other industries, along with agricultural seepage, climate change, and projects like the Savannah Harbor deepening, also affect the aquifer’s capacity and quality. Saltwater intrusion levels are rising as the demand for fresh water is fast increasing with the explosive growth of the surrounding counties. The new Hyundai plant has plans to drill four new wells to supply 6.6 millions of water a day to help the power electric vehicle factory, and it might not be enough.

The tug-of-war over our most precious shared resource has been on full display at the State Capitol during the Georgia Assembly’s ridiculously short session (it’s only three months long, yet we pay state taxes for the whole year, hmm?) 

A few weeks ago, Savannah representative Ron Stephens lamented the lack of workforce housing for the 8000 new Hyundai employees coming to southeast Georgia, blaming the onerous administrative acrobatics required to supply water to new developments by the county. He implored his fellow delegates to pass HB 1146, a bill that he crafted that would allow the EPD to issue water permits to private entities without oversight from local governments.