Southscapes Spring 2008

The face of Georgia's drought

It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it

By Stepahnie Schupska

A young Clint Eastwood bites hard the cigar in the corner of his mouth. His grimacing eyes stare straight ahead but see all. Dust clouds swirl around him as he walks past a dry watering trough. His spurs jangle and echo down abandoned alleyways. He hears a faint click behind him. He stops. He turns, draws his revolver and . . .

"To many people, drought is Clint Eastwood walking down a deserted town in the West with tumbleweeds and dead cattle on the side," said University of Georgia associate professor David Stooksbury, who has been Georgia's state climatologist since 1999. "That's not what drought in the Southeast looks like. Drought for us is 30 inches of rain."

Georgia ground doesn't have to crack like the Mojave for there to be a drought. Because the state supports more trees in one square mile than some Western states have in 100 miles, dropping below 30 inches of water in a year can be devastating. U.S. deserts average 10 inches of rain a year.

Water, (cough) water

Many in Georgia remember Sept. 28, 2007, as the day outdoor spigots in 61 counties in north Georgia were turned off due to drought. The current drought actually started 18 months earlier when a little boy – El Niño – wouldn't cooperate and deliver his normal winter rain.

"The winter of 2006 is when we see this nosedive," Stooksbury told a room full of reporters in October 2007. He held another press conference two months later, but few reporters attended in part because it was raining. That typically happens when it rains during drought.

"In July we had normal rainfall for a few weeks," Stooksbury said. "Many people thought we were out of the drought."

As each week passed, Stooksbury wrote articles, answered reporters' calls and held press conferences. By January 2008, he effectively became the face of Georgia's drought.

"The problem with drought is that for every person there is an individual definition of drought, of how it's impacting them personally," Stooksbury said.

Not making hay

This drought hasn't just kept Georgia residents from watering at their convenience. It has hit two agriculture-based industries hard.

"Beef cattle producers lost $400 million in forages," said John McKissick, director of the UGA Center for Agribusiness and Economic Development. "Most, but not all of it, was in the northern part of the state."

At Throne Stock Farms near LaGrange, Chris Throne was trying to grow hay for the winter and keep his cows fed last summer. And then the grass dried up.

"Until two weeks ago, it looked like Afghanistan around here," he said in January. "In 20 years, this is the first time I've had to feed my cows hay in the summer."

The drought has cost Georgia's green industry lost sales and 35,000 jobs. The total impact was $1.3 billion last year. The actual drought didn't cause business to wither, but the outdoor watering bans did.

"What happened was absolute pandemonium in our industry," said Jenny Hardgrave, who owns and designs landscapes for Atlanta-based Simply Flowers. "It was absolute chaos figuring out where we could work from day to day."

Drought is normal

Drought in Georgia is normal, Stooksbury said. It was the weather in the 1950s through the '70s that was abnormally wet.

"We had 30 years of very benign climate," Stooksbury said. "When we go back now and look at the records, we don't understand it."

Before the late '70s, less than 100,000 acres, mostly small areas of tobacco and vegetables, were irrigated in Georgia. Then a shockingly normal drought kicked in. The sales of irrigation equipment soared, said Jim Hook, a crop and soil sciences professor with the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

Once farmers installed irrigation, they were able to produce a crop every year. Bankers took notice and were more likely to award loans to farmers who had irrigation. An estimated 1.5 million acres are now irrigated in Georgia.

When it comes to adding water or waiting for rain, Hook said the 5,000 Georgia farmers with irrigation can't be wrong, even if they're not going to make money every year. In some years, like 2007, irrigation saved several crops, especially in southwest Georgia.

"We had a lot more input costs," McKissick said. "They were pretty expensive crops to produce because of the drought. But because of high prices many crops had, most producers did OK."

Eye on the sky and water tables

Some areas of the state, like the water table in the Dougherty plain, rebound completely almost every year. But toward the coast, you find places where groundwater isn't rebounding.

Boat houses barely touch the water of Lake Lanier in this aerial view in Buford, Ga.

"We have times like April and May of last year when the water table in Tift County dropped sharply," Hook said. "It concerned everybody so much that they went into a phase 4 drought."

What's needed, he said, is a longterm vision. That's a big part of the statewide water management plan Gov. Sonny Perdue signed on Feb. 6.

"In the past, we've been managing water in a very piecemeal fashion," said UGA Cooperative Extension engineer Mark Risse. "This is the beginning of an effort that will allow us to manage water resources in a more sustainable manner."

It takes a lot of work to learn what is happening underground.

"To figure out how rainfall over a period of years affects groundwater is a big deal," Hook said. "It's not impacted strictly by what happens in one year. It's what happens over a period of years that makes a difference."

Drought isn't the only problem the plan considers. Unprecedented growth plays a major role in dwindling water supplies.

"When I was born on Peachtree Street, the population of metro Atlanta was about 1 million and the state of Georgia a little over 4 million," Stooksbury said. "Now metro Atlanta has a population near 4.5 million and the state a population near 9.5 million. We have more than doubled our population, but the amount of available water is the same as it was 50 years ago."

Back in Athens

When he isn't the face of Georgia's drought, Stooksbury is a CAES associate professor of engineering atmospheric sciences and advisor for his old fraternity, Phi Kappa Theta.

David Stooksbury finishes an equation for one of the several classes he teaches before heading to his computer to check stream levels.

When Stooksbury started as a freshman at UGA in '76, he was just another face in the crowd at what was then the UGA College of Agriculture. After finishing his master and doctorate degrees, he went to Lincoln, Neb., an unlikely place known for fickle weather. Just 3 feet of desktop separated Stooksbury's desk at the University of Nebraska from the National Drought Mitigation Center.

"I learned a great deal about drought at Nebraska," he said, "like it was priming me for this position."

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