Hot water: states need water like never before, which creates competition but also cooperation.

• Author: Boulard, Garry

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As the former mayor of Pooler, Ga., Earl C. "Buddy" Carter has seen firsthand one of the unexpected results of buoyant population growth.

"We were just like every other community in Georgia," says Carter, who is now a member of the state's House of Representatives. "We very much wanted to promote growth. In 1996 the population of Pooler stood at about 4,500 and today it is more than 12,000. And that, to us, was good news."

But with a dramatic increase in new residents that has been replicated throughout the state, the city of Pooler has also had to confront a potential water crisis.

"We tried to make certain that we had the resources, in particular water and sewer, to provide for the new people coming in," says Carter. "But if you have a population boom going on everywhere else in the state that is drawing off of the same supply source, you have to eventually wonder how much you can handle. At what point do you worry about exceeding the limits of your supply?"

According to the 2007 U.S. Census estimates, Georgia, with 9.5 million people, has become, population-wise, the ninth-largest state in the country, with more people than New Jersey and North Carolina and just 500,000 fewer than Michigan. Four decades ago it was the nation's 15th largest state.

Growth in Georgia has been in all parts of the state, but mostly in the Atlanta area, which, with 5.1 million people, makes up more than half of Georgia's population.

"We say that there are two Georgias," remarks Carter. "There's Atlanta and there's everywhere else."

A MULTI-STATE ISSUE

For its drinking water, Atlanta and much of the northern swath of Georgia rely on manmade Lake Lanier. At the head of the Chattahoochee River, it also supplies water for parts of Florida and Alabama. That worked fine for awhile, says Michael Hayes, until the area suffered "one of the most severe droughts in recent history." That, added to the pressures of population growth, has caused Lake Lanier to sink to record low levels. That means that "a source of water that everyone has taken for granted has been found to be not as unlimited as previously imagined," he says.

The result, continues Hayes, who is the executive director of the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska, is not only bad news for Georgia, but Alabama--whose eastern border runs alongside the Chattahoochee--and Florida, which accesses the Chattahoochee's waters after it spills into the smaller Apalachicola.

"Rivers cross state borders," says Hayes. "A water level problem in one state will more than likely affect a host of other states nearby."

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The shrinking of Georgia's Lake Lanier--down in 2007 by more than 20 feet from its normal pool of 1,071 feet--has also...