Tag Archives: Quantity

Request participation in watershed planning –WWALS to Corps

Unanimously approved 10 July 2013 by the WWALS board (PDF).

From:
WWALS Watershed Coalition
3338 Country Club Road #L336
Valdosta, GA 31605
wwalswatershed@gmail.com
www.wwals.net
10 July 2013

To:
Jeffrey S Morris
Savannah District
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
100 W Oglethorpe Ave
Savannah, GA 31401
Jeffrey.S.Morris@usace.army.mil

Cc:
Mayor John Gayle

City of Valdosta
P.O. Box 1125
216 E. Central Ave.
Valdosta, GA 31603-1125
jgayle@valdostacity.com

Greetings from the pocosin swamps and blackwater river floodplains of central south Georgia! Continue reading

Solar passed GA PSC!

We (the people) won!

WWALS helped by writing a letter to GA PSC, reading it to them, and asking Commissioner Everett to vote for it. He did, and Georgia Power is now required to buy more than twice as much solar power. Details here.

-jsq

GA PSC solar decision tomorrow (July 11th)

Folks,

Tomorrow the PSC decides on requiring Georgia Power to add more solar power. The swing vote is H. Doug Everett, Commissioner for District 1, which includes all of our watersheds. He went to high school in Sylvester, which is in the Little River watershed, and he is on the board of the Georgia Agrirama Development Authority. You can contact him through the above web page, or call him at his PSC office: (800) 282-5813.

You probably remember last month the WWALS board sent a letter to the Georgia Public Service Commission asking for more solar and wind and less water-sucking baseload power plants. Garry Gentry read the letter to the PSC. More background here.

Here’s your chance to help make more solar happen for Georgia.

-jsq

Agricultural runoff

The Southern Georgia Regional Commission invites you to contact them about agricultural runoff. WWALS is concerned with how industrial farming and clear cutting affects both water quality and quantity in our watershed.

Runoff on Old Valdosta Road in Berrien County 2013-07-08 The pictured example of runoff from a cotton field was in Berrien County yesterday. While rain was pouring down, it ran half way across the road, and two cars wrecked. Once it gets across the road, either over it or through the culvert, it runs into the Withlacoochee River. As Pesticide Action Network reminds us, “Conventionally grown cotton uses more insecticides than any other single crop.”

Abbie Fentress Swanson wrote for GPB 6 July 2013, What Is Farm Runoff Doing To The Water? Scientists Wade In,

Agriculture is the nation’s leading cause of impaired water quality, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Continue reading

Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –WWALS to GA PSC

Approved 12 June 2013 by unanimous vote of the WWALS board, Dave has mailed a signed copy to the Georgia Public Service Commission, and I will go read it to the PSC Tuesday morning at 10 AM 18 June 2013, at their hearing about

Docket 36498, Georgia Power Company’s 2013 Integrated Resource Plan and Application for Decertification of Various Units
and
Docket 36499, Application for the Certification of Amended Demand Side Management Plan

Y’all come! -jsq

From: WWALS Watershed Coalition, Inc.
3338 Country Club Road #L336
Valdosta, GA 31605
12 June 2013

To: Georgia
Public Service Commission

244 Washington Street, SW
Atlanta GA, 30334-9052

Dear Public Service Commissioners and Staff,

The recent rains have swollen our blackwater rivers, Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, and Little, under our longleaf pines and Spanish-moss-covered oaks, and filled up the tea-colored tannin waters in our frog-singing pocosin cypress swamps here in central South Georgia. But that was only a dent in our protracted drought that ranges from mild to extreme, with projections not much better.

We do not need more traditional big baseload power plants gulping down our river or aquifer water when solar and wind power use far less, and those renewables are now at grid parity with coal, natural gas, and nuclear.

Power plants are thirsty, as the Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out in a 2011 report, “Freshwater Use by U.S. Power Plants: Electricity’s Thirst for a Precious Resource”.

Much of the water used to cool power plants evaporates, and is Continue reading