Thirsty City

Politics, Greed, and the Making of Atlanta's Water Crisis

Skye Borden

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438452807
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Stadtentwicklung

Atlanta is running out of water and is in the midst of a water crisis. Its crumbling infrastructure spews toxic waste and raw sewage into neighboring streams. A tri-state water war between Alabama, Florida, and Georgia has been raging since 1990, with Atlanta caught in the middle; however, the city's problems have been more than a century in the making. In Thirsty City, Skye Borden tells the complete story of how Atlanta's water ran dry. Using detailed historical research, legal analysis, and personal accounts, she explores the evolution of Atlanta's water system as well as charts the poor urban planning decisions that led to the city's current woes. She also uncovers the loopholes in local, state, and federal environmental laws that have enabled urban planners to shirk responsibility for ongoing water quantity and quality problems. From the city's unfortunate location to its present-day debacle, Thirsty City is a fascinating and highly readable account that reveals how Atlanta's quest for water is riddled with shortsighted decisions, unchecked greed, political corruption, and racial animus.

1

LIFE BEFORE THE CHATTAHOOCHEE

Atlanta is, in many ways, an accidental city. It began as just a surveying footnote, and then it grew in a place where no one assumed a city could be. The land around Atlanta was a vast wilderness until 1838, when a major rail line sliced through the region’s dense woods. The future city center began as a small clearing at the end of this line, a junction place where trains filled with coastal plantation cotton met Midwestern wheat-belt freight.

A decade before, Georgia governor William Schley had hired an engineer named Stephen Harriman Long to survey the northern part of the state for a railroad line to connect Georgia’s plantation communities to the Tennessee River. Long immediately packed his bags and headed into the heart of Cherokee country, but he couldn’t have picked a worse time to survey. His trip was timed after the Indian Removal Act but before the Trail of Tears, and the entire region was roiling with tension between the white settlers, the federal government, and the local Cherokee tribes. Aside from the rough crew of prospectors that still panned for gold in the hills around Dahlonega, few white people chose to travel through the wilderness of the Georgia piedmont.¹

Long himself didn’t rough it in the wilderness for a lengthy time. Instead, he hired three principal assistants to lead separate survey brigades, and then he rode back home for a few months to “take care of his affairs.” Each of his brigades consisted of a principal assistant, three surveyors, two chainmen to take measurements, two axmen to clear routes for the surveys, one commissary to bring food to the crew, one cook, and one active lad to run errands for the others.² These men did the bulk of the surveying work and then reported the results to Long.

In Long’s official reports to the state legislature in 1837, there is no mention of the city-building capacity of the railroad’s terminal point. In fact, there is no mention of the terminal point at all.³ Neither Long nor the state legislature seemed to care what happened at the end of the tracks. The state’s only directive was that the terminal point needed to be the “most eligible for the running of branch roads” to Athens, Madison, Milledgeville, Forsyth, and Columbus.⁴ The final law specified that the official route would connect Chattanooga, then called Rossville, to Montgomery’s ferry on the Chattahoochee, but it left the line’s terminal point to be determined at a later date.⁵

Sometime in the fall of 1837, a crew of surveyors led by Albert Brisbane measured the slope, elevation, and soil quality of a site seven miles from the Chattahoochee River. Their measurements indicated that rail lines could be brought into the area from all sides. Without any fanfare, the crew drove a stake in the ground to mark it as the rail line’s terminal point, Mile Marker Zero.⁶

In retrospect, this mundane surveying act of hammering a stake into the ground is the starting point of the city of Atlanta, the time when the city was first tied to a fixed geographic location. Everything that Atlanta is today—the Buckhead mansions, the skyscraper skyline, the bypasses of Spaghetti Junction—can all be traced back to this one stake in the ground.

In the summer of 1838, a crew of state workers descended upon the wilderness around Mile Marker Zero and began to cut down trees to clear the line. By 1845, fifty-two miles of rail had been graded and the track had been laid. The next year, access railroads from the cotton-producing town reached the end of the line. Four years later, in 1851, the first train ran from the Chattahoochee to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the Western and Atlantic Railroad was complete.⁷

During the same time, the rail line’s terminal point underwent its own transformation. Although originally referred to only as “Terminus” on engineering maps, the city incorporated as Marthasville in 1843. In 1845, after rail men complained that its name was too long to print on tickets, the town was renamed Atlanta, the feminine version of the mythical city Atlantis.

In light of how much the city has grown, it is amazing to think about just how arbitrarily the city was located and created. The fact that so much has grown up from one tiny little surveying stake might seem less absurd if the stake were marking a beneficial geophysical characteristic, like fertile soil or a salt lick or a mountain spring. That a massive city with millions of people could be founded upon soil whose only distinguishing characteristic was an even, low grade slope is a testament to just how divorced from the natural world our human development had become.

Americans now build cities in the desert, drive cars through mountaintop tunnels, and build encampments on the South Pole, but at the time of Atlanta’s creation, most of our nation’s development still arose from some kind of relationship to the physical landscape. Military posts developed in naturally defensible areas, agrarian communities thrived in places with rich soils and ample sunlight, and cities formed along major waterways. Atlanta defied this convention, and, like any other entity at the forefront of a movement, the city encountered serious obstacles and setbacks as a result of its precociousness.

The land around Mile Marker Zero was dense with sourwood, gooseberry, and chinquapin shrubs underneath a canopy of scrubby oaks and pines.⁸ Around the site, there were only a few tiny streams. To the west and north, three of the Chattahoochee’s tributaries—Peachtree Creek, Utoy Creek, and Nancy’s Creek—flowed down from nearby ridges.⁹ To the east, the headwaters of the South River formed and flowed to the Ocmulgee River and the Atlantic Ocean.¹⁰ To the south, the Flint River began as just a trickle and then flowed through 350 miles of forest and plantation farmland before joining with the Chattahoochee River at the shared border among Georgia, Alabama, and the territory of Florida.

Today, the Chattahoochee River is an urban stream. It traverses through the rapidly expanding suburb of Dunwoody and across the city’s unofficial barrier between suburbia and the inner city, “the Perimeter” of Interstate 285. It flows by industrial parks and high-rise condominiums, and underneath interstate overpasses and neighborhood thoroughfares. In aerial pictures of the city, a long tendril of hazy gray asphalt extends out from the Perimeter on either side of the river’s banks.

The Chattahoochee, however, was not always so inextricably intertwined with Atlanta’s urban landscape. The statistical metropolitan area of today’s Atlanta encompasses over eight thousand square miles. Over the past 170 years, the city has grown beyond the Chattahoochee River, spreading west to the Tallapoosa River and north to the Coosa. It grew past the South River to cover the majority of the Ocmulgee basin and much of the Oconee basin beyond it. The city’s homes, businesses, and stores have spread out into the countryside and blanketed millions of acres of forestland in urban development. Atlantans now drink water from the streams, rivers, and lakes of fifteen different counties and six major watersheds.¹¹

In the 1850s, however, the city limits extended to an area less than one half of 0.01 of a percent of Atlanta’s present statistical boundary. Atlanta’s original incorporation line circled a one-mile radius from the center of town at Peachtree and Marietta streets to a northern boundary at the present-day Ivan Allen Jr. Boulevard and a southern boundary around the Georgia State Capital. The farthest reaches of the city were still a full six miles removed from the Chattahoochee, and the distance between the two was blanketed by a thick, impermeable forest.

By today’s standards, six miles is a trifling distance to travel and a minor infrastructural hurdle to overcome. Even in the crushing Atlanta traffic, I could drive the seven miles on Interstate 20 from the city center to the Chattahoochee in a half an hour or less. By now, the city of Atlanta has also laid down over 2,400 miles of water mains, which could cover the distance between the capital and the Chattahoochee four hundred times over. In fact, if stretched in a line, the city’s pipes could extend across the country and tap into Portland, Oregon’s water supply on the Columbia River.

At the time the city was founded, though, seven miles was a substantial distance. Even on the relatively even ground beside the train tracks, the trip to the riverbank and back would take about five hours on foot. Horseback riders could take a road to the ferry and back in about a half a day, but few ever made the trip unless they planned to travel. The city also didn’t have any water mains, let alone thousands of miles of them.

Without modern water infrastructure or access to rapid transportation, Atlanta was unable to draw from the Chattahoochee’s relatively abundant supply of water. Instead, the city found itself in the unusual position of supporting a substantial population without a reliable water source.

Atlanta’s lack of a navigable waterway was a serious economic obstacle. At that time in the nineteenth century, railroad transportation was still an upstart industry. The old, established trading routes were on America’s inland waterways, and many businesses used barges and steamboats exclusively to transport freight. Without an inland port, Atlanta would miss out on a lot of these commercial opportunities. And, in the absence of waterborne competition, the railroads also had a habit of price-gouging landlocked cities on freight rates.

In addition to transportation concerns, Atlanta’s lack of water made the city more vulnerable to widespread fires. In the era before electricity, households and businesses used fireplaces, wood-burning stoves, and gas lamps for heating, cooking, and light. Accidents occurred regularly, and house fires were commonplace. Firefighters in cities along large waterways could draw water directly from a river to fight large-scale blazes, but none of Atlanta’s streams were large enough to combat a significant fire event.

It was incredibly rare for a city to develop away from a large body of water. Throughout the nineteenth century, only two American cities—Indianapolis and Denver—were able to grow to more than 100,000 residents without a navigable waterway. Both cities were anomalies: Indianapolis was created based on the false assumption that the White River would become navigable, and Denver was part of the Colorado gold rush boom. It seemed unfathomable to many that Atlanta would defy the odds and become the nation’s third landlocked city.

At first, very few people believed that Atlanta would become a city of any size or importance. Stephen Harriman Long infamously wrote that the site was suitable only for a “tavern, a blacksmith’s shop, a general store, and nothing else.”¹² Richard Peters, the future Atlanta streetcar magnate, wrote to a friend, “The place can never be much of a trading city, yet may be of some importance in a small way.”¹³ Land sales were also initially sluggish. The first land auction in 1842 drew only a handful of spectators, and by the end of three years, only three out of seventeen parcels had been sold.¹⁴

A handful of early settlers, however, remained irrationally optimistic. In the first few years of railroad development, the settlers cleared five acres for a public square and this became the center of town.¹⁵ The town’s few residents also began to develop infrastructure to support the depot’s scheduled train traffic. When the president of the Georgia Railroad stepped off the train for the first time, he almost fell into an open well that was being dug at the depot.¹⁶ Upon completion of the railroad in 1845, most of the remaining plots of land were purchased, and as many as two hundred people moved to the area.¹⁷

In terms of water infrastructure, antebellum Atlanta was like any other small city at the time. There was no municipal water supply or central reservoir for drinking water. Instead, early inhabitants hauled water in buckets from the nearby streams and creeks for drinking, cooking, and washing.¹⁸ To avoid the daily trips to the streams, some families built barrels next to their homes to collect rain, and many wealthier residents built cisterns or spring pumps.¹⁹

Before long, the settlement began to struggle in the absence of an abundant, centralized water supply. Denver and Indianapolis may have not had navigable rivers in town, but at least the cities had rivers large enough to meet the drinking water and fire protection needs of an urban populace. Atlanta’s tiny streams were barely able to provide enough water for cooking and drinking, with little left over for firefighting or any other use. As Atlanta began to slowly transform into a mercantile center, it became clear that major waterworks would be necessary to sustain the town’s growth.

Although there had been grumblings about the water supply before, the town’s first fire turned the area’s limited water availability into a cause célèbre. One night in 1850, a robber set fire to two prominent businesses, including a large cotton warehouse, on opposite sides of town. While the undetected man cleaned out the railroad depot’s money drawer, the rest of the town hastily formed a “bucket brigade” to put out the flames. Although the structures were saved, the warehouse lost much of its inventory.²⁰ After the flames had died down, the townspeople began to agitate for an official fire department, complete with a reliable water supply.

Before the town could get any municipal services, however, its government would need a major overhaul. At the time, Atlanta was a divided town. Many of the earliest inhabitants and visitors were old miners from Georgia’s short-lived 1828 gold rush. Others were hardscrabble pioneers and wanderers, or out of work rail men who stuck around after the Western and Atlantic construction had ended. They were a rough crowd, and their presence single-handedly supported the thriving bars and brothels that sprung up in the sh...