The Tennessee River is not to be taken for granted.
It shouldn’t be piped to North Georgia in a land grab, either.
In 1998, a Georgia planner named Harry West half jokingly talked of sticking “a big straw” in the Tennessee to bring water to thirsty Atlanta.
The talk made headlines and galvanized Tennessee state officials to action, drafting a new permitting law that bans what is called “interbasin transfers.” The bill quickly passed unanimously.
In approving it, Tennessee lawmakers and policy wonks pointed to the example of the Colorado River, which once flowed from the Rockies into Mexico and then to the Gulf of California. Now, after being diverted hundreds of miles to Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and other fast-growing cities and acres of thirsty deserts converted to croplands, 70 percent of the Colorado’s water is siphoned away.
What was once a lush delta in Mexico where the river joined the ocean is now dry.
The Tennessee River is the nation’s fifth-largest river system with a nearly 41,000-square-mile drainage area — the basin or watershed of the river as it flows 652 miles from upper east Tennessee through Knoxville, Chattanooga and Huntsville, Ala., and Eastport, Miss., before it turns north and runs back into the Volunteer State. It crosses the state to form the division between Middle and West Tennessee before flowing finally into the Ohio River at Paducah, Ky.
Georgia, claiming that a botched 1826 land survey set its border with Tennessee one mile too far south and cheated Georgia of a cornerhold on the river, wants to move the state line and pipe away hundreds of millions of gallons a day.
Estimates now indicate metro Atlanta and North Georgia would need at least 264 million gallons a day just to make up expected 2030 “net deficits” in the Chattahoochee and Coosa river basins that now serve them.
Why so much? Because Atlanta is one of the few cities on the continent that was not built on a river or water source that could sustain it. And it keeps growing, but not dealing with that growth in any durable way.
Chattanoogans, on average, use 95 gallons of water per person per day, according to Tennessee American Water Co.
In Atlanta, that per-person number is 151 gallons a day, according to Georgia’s Environmental Protection Department. And that’s despite summer watering bans and public urgings for conservation.
Nonetheless, Georgia lawmakers recently fast-tracked a new bill — the 10th in about as many years — seeking to move the state line to the 35th parallel, the marker Congress intended as the border between the states.
And it’s all to give Georgia about an acre of access to the Tennessee River near Nickajack Cave.
This bill differs from previous ones in that it wouldn’t move the entire state line. Instead it seeks a 1.5-square-mile strip of land, not 65.5 square miles.
Tennessee lawmakers mostly have just shaken their heads.
We hope Atlanta can find an appropriate solution.
But the river in our backyard is not it.
This is a edited reprint of an editorial that first appeared in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
