Commissioner Hunter to testify before Congress about drought

March 10, 2008 –  Commissioner Rob Hunter will testify tomorrow before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Water Resources and Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure tomorrow that U.S. Army Corps of Engineers policies have exacerbated the drought currently plaguing the Atlanta and the Southeast.

The commissioner will tell representatives that the Interim Operating Plan under which the Corps manages flow of the Chattahoochee River to Florida is responsible for the current 18-foot deficit in water levels at Lake Lanier. He will note that the situation is critical and that blaming Atlanta’s withdrawals from the river for low lake and river levels is not supported by the facts. “Atlanta uses 1 percent of the annual water volume in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint basin during normal years and 2 percent during extreme drought,” Commissioner Hunter says. “In other words, if metro Atlanta did not withdraw a single drop of water, flows at the Georgia-Florida border would improve, at best, by a mere 2 percent.”

Commissioner Hunter will propose a three-step solution for recovery of the ACF reservoir system:

1. adoption of an emergency recovery plan;
2. replacement of the Interim Operating Plan with a better plan; and
3. adoption of a comprehensive water control plan for the ACF basin based on facts and sound science.