The Water Wars Move East

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The Southeast, observes NWF (National Wildlife Federation) climate scientist Amanda Staudt, “didn’t need to think about water supplies until recently, but it should have.” Between 1960 and 2000, as the region’s population doubled and its water use tripled, abundant rain was falling. However, a 2008 NWF report graphing the historic rainfall levels for the southeastern United States shows droughts were commonplace between 1895 and 1960. And in the future, says Staudt, the report’s author, global warming may make the region’s water supplies even more limited.

Much is at stake for both people and wildlife. Environmental flow, the concept of leaving enough water in a river to sustain plants and animals, has long been a contentious topic in the American West. Now the water wars—fights over who owns the rights to the resources in certain waterways—are erupting in the southeastern states, which have a rich diversity of fish, crayfish, freshwater mussels, turtles and salamanders found nowhere else in the world. A single river in Tennessee has more fish species than all of Europe’s waterways. Florida’s Apalachicola River Basin harbors the highest density of amphibians and reptiles in North America, north of Mexico. Many other species also rely on southern U.S. streams.

In one squabble that has gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, North Carolina and South Carolina are squaring off over the Catawba River. Named the most endangered river in the country in 2008 by the nonprofit group American Rivers, the Catawba rises in the foothills of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains and flows past Charlotte, one of the fastest growing cities in the country, before crossing the state line into South Carolina. “The Catawba already provides drinking water for 1.68 million people and it has 14 dams, 13 of which are hydroelectric,” says Catawba Riverkeeper David Merryman, the full-time watchdog for the 225-mile-long waterway. The river also cools two nuclear and three coal-fired power plants, and other industries tap its resources as well. But the action that triggered the lawsuit by the State of South Carolina was a petition by two North Carolina towns, Concord and Kannapolis, to withdraw 36 million gallons a day from the river even though, notes Merryman, these communities are located in a different watershed, the Yadkin-Pee Dee River Basin.

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Other southern rivers are facing similar threats. One of them is the St. John’s, which rises in central Florida and flows north to the sea at Jacksonville. Because of rampant development in the Orlando area, state officials are proposing to siphon 260 million gallons a day out of the St. John’s and its largest tributary, the Ocklawaha. In the past, says Neil Armingeon, the St. John’s riverkeeper, most of the state’s water supply has come from the Florida aquifer. But growth in central Florida is outstripping the ability of the aquifer to provide a sustainable drinking water source. Armingeon says no one knows what taking that much water would do to the St. John’s. Of particular concern is the river’s delicate balance between freshwater and saltwater. “The salinity line is moving farther upstream,” he says, and that could stress aquatic plants and animals. Right now, for example, beds of underwater vegetation called eelgrass are common in portions of the St. John’s. These plants are nurseries for fish, blue crabs and shrimp, and also provide cover for stingrays. Manatees swim into the river’s tributaries in the spring and summer to feed on their luxuriant growth. But “eelgrass is very sensitive to increases in salinity,” says Armingeon. “They’re sessile plants. If they can’t tolerate the changes, they’re done.”

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Another mussel researcher, Steve Golladay, an associate scientist at the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center in southwestern Georgia, notes that “rivers do many things. It’s very easy to put an economic value on water supply, but it’s more challenging to put a number on the other benefits of a river.” Wastewater discharge, recreation and the support of rare plants and animals are often overlooked or underappreciated, he says, adding, “We can’t take our water resources for granted anymore.” That is especially true now that global warming is expected to exacerbate shortages, says NWF’s Staudt. Climate change is predicted to bring longer periods of drought in the future. Paradoxically, she notes, it will also trigger periods of intense rainfall, with heavy precipitation falling during a short period of time. The result: more runoff and less water available for drinking, irrigating crops and other purposes. Also, sea-level rise as a result of warming will mean more saltwater intrusion into aquifers along the coast. And recent studies show the underground intrusion of saltwater into wells may extend farther inland than previously believed.

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http://www.nwf.org/NationalWildlife/article.cfm?issueID=131&articleID=1775