Yesterday, in our post on the good drought news, we noted a brewing battle between Georgia, on the one hand, and Alabama/Florida on the other, over rights to water from dwindling Lake Lanier.
Today's Washington Post has a full front page story on the water war, which is causing a headache for President W since it involves carping between three Southern Republican governors. See "3 States Compete For Water From Shrinking Lake Lanier."
Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue, a right wing hack if we ever saw one, says its a battle of "man versus mussel" because Florida's claim to some of the water is based, in part, on the need to preserve a rare fresh water mussel. Alabama says it needs the water to keep a major nuclear reactor running. And Florida says its about much more than mussels--the water is needed to keep industry and fishing alive in Apalachicola Bay.
Florida and Alabama also accuse Georgia of waiting until far too late to initiate water conservation measures, which is largely true. Even now, Georgia's water restrictions are pretty loose for a situation where Atlanta says it has only two or three months of water left.
Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers says there's still more than enough water to go around, at least for now.
So Bush has dispatched his Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, to mediate the dispute. We hope Georgia will get some much needed rain soon--the four day soaker that just left the Southeast helped with a lot of states, but largely bypassed Georgia. In the meantime, the worsening drought could result in some interesting political theater, as we're talking about a bunch that doesn't cotton to the notion of "sacrifice."
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