Water officials to discuss demand

North Georgia water officials will try to gaze into the future Wednesday as they study water demand forecasts for the region.

According to its agenda, the Coosa-North Georgia Water Planning Council will analyze municipal, industrial, energy and agricultural water demand projections.

David Ashburn, Walker County coordinator and water council vice chairman, said he hoped the data would be the missing piece to what the group has tried to accomplish so far.

"That's been the biggest thing we've needed all along is the projections of water usage," he said.

Information needed from state experts was simple: How much water the region uses now, how much it might need in the future and how much water is available.

"With those things in place, you can make an opinion on which way to go," he said.

Getting reliable figures for those forecasts has proven difficult, with council members poking holes in initial estimates at past meetings.

Jimmy Petty, a Murray County farmer who serves on the council, said he particularly was interested in the agriculture projections, which he and other farmers said discounted the poultry industry in initial estimates.

"The figure they had for agriculture we thought was way off," he said.

On Friday, the co-chairmen of Gov. Perdue's Water Contingency Task Force released a statement underscoring the dire straits of Georgia's water crisis. The group was created to develop fallback options in case a federal appeals court upholds a judge's ruling that Atlanta must stop using so much water from Lake Lanier.

Experts project a 34 percent gap between permitted water withdrawal and projected demand if the judge's ruling stands, according to the task force report, written by Coca-Cola CEO John Brock and Tim Lowe, president of Lowe Engineers.

"It will likely take a broad combination of ideas to address this potentially acute need," the co-authors wrote. "Some may be relatively simple to implement, others may require more of a sacrifice."

According to the report, the task force identified three areas of focus at its first meeting: Enhancing current conservation efforts, increasing the state's ability to capture rain and groundwater, and reviewing current control and management policies.