Moultrie Observer

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October 19, 2007

Richardson: N. Ga. no threat to S.Ga. water

Lori Glenn

DOERUN — South Georgia has nothing to worry about when it comes to North Georgia’s search for water, said Speaker of the House Glenn Richardson

This week in Doerun, while speaking to a group at Mobley Gin Company in support of Rep. Ed Rynders, Richardson assured businessmen that pumping water over distance is too expensive a prospect. He advocated the construction of a reservoir system in North Georgia to capture any rains that might come.

“If I were to come to (tell) you not to worry about something, I wouldn’t about North Georgia tapping an aquifer (in South Georgia),” he said.

Pushing water through a pipe is too expensive, but gasoline at $2.50 to $3 a gallon is a different story, he said. Desalination of ocean water is a good idea up to a 50-mile distance from the coast, he said. After that, transportation costs become too steep, he said.

“It’s not cost efficient, and it’s crazy. It’s crazy, but I wish we had an aquifer up there though,” he said.

Georgia has a huge systemic problem caused in part by poor decisions in the past by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division to require land application of wastewater effluent rather than discharging that effluent into waterways.

“I’ll bet half the plants in existence in Atlanta in the past 20 years, all of them are spray irrigation, and we should have been doing point discharge. They’re now back to point discharge,” he said.

At the beginning of the decade, he said, there was discussion to build 10 reservoirs across the state to impound drainage.

“It would help North Georgia, Middle Georgia and South Georgia with flows. It would help Alabama and Florida, but nobody would ever spend the money to do it,” he said.

“Let’s build some reservoirs, and let’s put up 200-foot buffers and buy the property around it and let private enterprise sell it and pay for the cost of building the reservoir from the people who want to live around a lake. How novel it that?” Richardson said. “I don’t understand why that is a problem.”

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