Water flow from Lake Lanier can be cut immediately

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Friday agreed to a plan to keep more water in Lake Lanier.

With that approval, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at noon started reducing its downstream releases of the depleted lake's water. The reduced flows can continue until June 1, if drought conditions do not improve.

The corps has been required to release more than a billion gallons from the lake every day, in part, to ensure the survival of federally protected mussels that live downstream in Florida's Apalachicola River.

The Fish and Wildlife's announcement was mostly good news for Georgia, which wants to hold as much water as possible in Lanier. The lake provides drinking water for more than 3 million metro Atlantans and is crucial for power generation.

"It's really the confirmation and affirmation of really good news for us," said Gov. Sonny Perdue, via telephone. He is in Canada on a trade mission.

The decision "more significantly indicates that our federal partners both from the Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife are intimately engaged in both the short and long-term solution to this water shortage that we have....we applaud their efforts."

Perdue took credit for alerting the federal government of the possibility that metro Atlanta is facing a possible water shortage.

"I think it was maybe Oct. 18 when I rang the alarm bell," the governor said. "No one seemed to be paying attention outside of our state. And in the 30 days that's ensued, we got extraordinary cooperation from those federal partners."

But Lanier won't get to keep as much water as Georgia officials had hoped and the corps had proposed.

The Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to a phased-in reduction in flow to 4,500 cubic feet per second, or 33,600 gallons per second, between now and June 1. The average flow has been nearer 5,000 cubic feet per second.

In a news release, the service said its biologists did not have time to study the downstream effects of releasing only 4,150 cubic feet per second, or 31,042 gallons per second.

That was the reduction the corps had proposed to help save water in Lanier, which is expected this weekend to hit its lowest level since the federal reservoir was built in the 1950s.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution