Atlanta case raises questions about water supply

Thanks to Joyce Tarnow for this article.
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Sixty years ago, the late Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield resisted helping to pay for Lake Lanier, a new federal reservoir being built north of town. Atlanta had plenty of water, he wrote Congress. Thanks, but no thanks.

Those words came back to haunt Atlanta last year. A federal judge ruled that the city has been illegally tapping Lanier for years as its primary water source. Unless Congress reclassifies the lake as a water supply, the judge ruled, Atlanta will be cut off by 2012.

The question now is how many other cities might be in the same boat, according to experts interviewed by The Associated Press. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which sells water from 135 federal reservoirs around the country, recently gave Congress a preliminary list of 40 projects in 14 states that were not initially authorized for supplying water but are being used for that purpose.

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