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Thursday is
LADIES’NIGHT'
Tuesday is
INDUSTRY NIGHT
Floods and Sprawl:
How Strong Is
the Connection?
Urban development—more asphalt, roof
tops, fewer trees—has been implicated in
massive flooding in the metro Atlanta area
from recent heavy rains.
It's not a new phenomenon. UGA hydrolo
gist Todd Rasmussen quotes a Time magazine
story from 1999 about Atlanta's sprawl: "Once
a wilderness, it's now a 13-county eruption,
one that has been called the fastest-spreading
human settlement in history. Already more
than 110 miles across, up from just 65 in
1990, it consumes an additional 500 acres of
field and farmland every week..."
As of press time, eight counties in Georgia
had been declared national disaster areas by
the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The number could rise once FEMA concludes
its study.
To check rainfall on
any day in any county,
visit www.cocorahs.
org. "We got eight to 10
inches of rain in a week period [in Athens],"
Rasmussen says. On the other hand, Douglas
County, one of the first to be declared a
disaster area, received about 11.5 inches in a
24-hour period.
Historically, people in the Athens area have
built mostly on high ground to avoid flooding
"But as land has become more valuable, peo
ple built in low-lying areas," Rasmussen says.
In 1967, 10 inches of rain fell in a 24-hour
period and the Oconee Street bridge over the
North Oconee River near downtown was under
five feet of water, he says.
Rasmussen says there are two aspects of
flood water: "There is more runoff because
of greater volume. The second is water is
conveyed more rapidly downstream. It accu
mulates faster." People upstream benefit from
municipal storm drains, "but those down
stream get flooded." In Northeast Georgia dur
ing the recent heavy rains, he says, "we came
out of a long drought. A lot of it got held up
in the watershed. The [relatively low] amount
of urbanization in the region held that back,
but if we had Atlanta north of us, we would
have experienced a raging torrent," Rasmussen
says.
That was certainly the case in Conyers
along the Yellow River, according to a Sept.
25 story in the Rockdale Citizen. In addition to
the week-long rains saturating the soil, flood
ing was intensified by the amount of sprawl
at the river's headwaters in Gwinnett County,
Georgia Perimeter College geologist John
Anderson told that newspaper.
There have long been theories that sprawl
affects rain runoff and contributes to flood
ing. But Marshall Shepherd, a UGA geographer,
is studying the ability of cities to affect cli
mate. "Cities impact rainfall and can create
their own rain and storms," he says.
Shepherd, who in 2001 began using NASA's
extensive satellite images and data to study
rainfall, started noticing that around large
cities "there seemed to be these anomalies
in rainfall downwind," he noted in "Urban
Rain," an article published by NASA's Earth
Observatory. However, arguments that the
copious amounts of rain that fell in parts of
metro Atlanta between Sept. 12 and Sept.
23 can be attributed to the effects of the
city itself "are speculative... it's way too
early to speculate influences," Shepherd
says. (The observations of cities' effects on
rainfall mostly have to do with summer thun
derstorms, not with the kind of large-scale
low pressure system that passed through the
Southeast in September.) But, he says, "we've
done a lot of work over the years on urban
effects of rainfall," and, Shepherd says, "there
seems to be heavier rainfall in an arc from
Douglas County north to Gwinnett County."
"Again, it's speculative but it certainly
seems to suggest a favorable distribution of
rainfall," he says, under the downwind effect.
One of the ways a large city like Atlanta can
influence rain is by having a concentration of
high and low buildings that impede surface
winds. As air goes around or over the city, it
creates a disturbance that leads to rain clouds
that form downwind. Pollution also has an
effect on cloud formations and rainfall.
Meteorologically speaking, an area of
low pressure over the lower Mississippi River
Valley drew moisture
from the Gulf of Mexico
over Georgia and other
southeastern states,
producing September's
heavy showers and storms. A low-pressure area
"sat" on top of the same area for several days,
causing the saturation and runoff.
"What made this system particularly note
worthy," Thomas Mote, a UGA climatologist,
says via email, "was that the heaviest pre
cipitation bands just happened to set up over
metro Atlanta, so it affected a much larger
population than if it had occurred over a rural
area. An equally heavy rainfall was recorded
near Toccoa, but we haven't heard nearly as
much about that."
And UGA hydrologist Rhett Jackson told
Flagpole in an email that the storm "also dem
onstrated that individual storm depths aon't
correlate well with peak [stream] flows in
forested basins. The forested streams produce
big floods when large storms fall when water
tables are high," he says, but "since the for
ested basins had been dry prior to this storm
and water tables were low, they could easily
absorb most of this storm."
According to Jackson, "clearly land use
strongly determined flow response for this
storm event. This storm shows that 'how' we
develop matters, and we need to do a better
job getting water into the ground rather than
running off the surface. We
also need to recognize that
100-year-old floodplains
are not stationary in urban
izing basins." (Indeed, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reported Sept. 26 that
many flooded metro area homes lie outside
of the flood zones delineated on FEMA maps,
which are used to determine the need for
flood insurance.)
And Mote says via email that there is much
to be learned from the storm's deadly toll
by remembering a simple safety credo: "Turn
Around, Don't Drown."
"I read that seven of the 10 deaths were
related to driving into floodwater," he says.
"I asked my 88-student class how many had
heard that expression, [and] only three people
raised their hands. This should be part of driv
ers' education and the Georgia driving test."
Cathy Mong
Prices for Recyclables
Down, but Starting to
Creep Up Again
In 2007, the Athens-Clarke County (ACC)
government made over $300,000 selling recy
cled materials. But since then, materials prices
have dropped, and the county is losing some
money on recycling now. For July and August
combined, processing fees exceeded revenues
by about $12,000, ACC Recycling Coordinator
Suki Jannsen says. "The markets are creeping
back up," she adds, so recycling could make
money again. "Really, recyclables are just raw
materials for the items that we [consumers]
purchase," she says. But recycling still saves
landfill space for the county, and landfills are
expensive and hard to site. "It's still, envi
ronmentally speaking, the best thing to do to
recycle," Jannsen says.
In 2007-08, Athens-Clarke County had an
overall recycling rate of 35 percent—including
sewage sludge and leaf-and-limb scraps,
which the county will soon begin composting
together at the landfill, and will make avail
able to the public. Many businesses (as well
as homeowners) are good recyclers; Jannsen is
working on new stickers that can be displayed
by businesses that recycle. In addition to
paper, cardboard, cans and plastic containers
(numbers one and two) that are picked up
curbside, scrap metal and used electronics can
also be recycled at the landfill, and leftover
cleaners, pesticides, paint cans and such can
be recycled at occasional collection events.
John Huie johnphuie@gmail.com
Traffic-Calming Working
on King Avenue, but
No Roundabout Ahead
Less may be more at the intersection of
King Avenue with Matthews Avenue/ Belvoir
Heights, where residents had asked the county
to add four-way stop signs. A county study
said that would be justified based on traffic
counts at the neighborhood intersection, but
in the meantime, the county has added speed-
limit signs and crosswalks, and has plans to
visually narrow some lanes
to further calm traffic. And
that seems to be working,
neighbors say; they've now
asked their commissioners
to hold off on the four-way
stop. "They would like to
see what happens," Commissioner Mike Hamby
said at the ACC Commission's Sept. 17 agenda
setting meeting. "They're pleased with the
traffic-calming that has occurred."
A traffic circle, or "roundabout," was also
considered for the intersection, at the request
of commissioners. Even small ones work well
in Europe, Commissioner Andy Herod said, to
move traffic quickly through intersections.
But to accommodate school buses and deliv
ery trucks, the study on King Avenue said,
a roundabout would have to be 50 feet in
diameter, and would require additional land,
costing $300,000.
John Huie johnphuie@gmail.com
“This storm shows that ‘how’
we develop matters...” *
“They’re pleased with
the traffic-calming that
has occurred.”
6 FLAGPOLE.COM • SEPTEMBER 30,2009