When New Building Dries Up Resources

UNTIL five years ago, it seemed that the breakneck pace of development in Effingham County, a Savannah suburb in southeast Georgia, knew no limits.

But like other fast-growing areas across the country, Effingham had to learn that large-scale expansion often comes at a price. In the county’s case, it was the long-term integrity of the vast underground water supply that serves it as well as other major areas in the South.

“The prevalent mentality that natural resources have no end has come to an abrupt halt here,” said John A. Henry, chief executive of Effingham’s Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Authority. Because overuse of its wells could draw in saltwater, the county can no longer rely solely on the wells for business and residential use, he explained, and it has been buying water from Savannah for the last five years.

As a result, cities in the county have had to spend millions of dollars and expect to spend millions more to try to keep up with growth. Residents’ water bills have risen significantly, and yet, the growth continues.

As recently as the early 1980s, Effingham County was still dotted with farms and corner gas stations. But in the last two decades it has grown rapidly, becoming home to subdivisions and to businesses like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. The county’s population was 37,535 in 2000, a 46.1 percent increase from the 25,687 population in 1990, according to census figures. By 2006, it was 48,954, up another 30.4 percent.

Effingham’s development has been most noticeable in the city of Rincon, 20 miles north and slightly west of Savannah along State Highway 21, where new building permits for single-family houses rose to 268 last year from 65 in 1996. The city’s population in 2006, according to census data, reached 6,922, an increase of more than 58 percent from 2000, when it was 4,376.

The water problem became widely known about a decade ago, after years of investigation by scientists at the United States Geological Survey. They said that intense industrial and residential development had caused a cone of depression in the Upper Floridan aquifer, straining the key underground water source past its limits.
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