Ga. official calls for new meetings on saltwater intrusion

By Walter C. Jones Morris News Service
Monday, December 10, 2012

The head of Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division said Monday that meetings need to resume with South Carolina on ways to protect drinking water in Savannah and Hilton Head Island from saltwater seeping into the groundwater.

EPD Director Jud Turner made the comment as part of an update to state lawmakers meeting at the University of Georgia for briefings on issues they could confront in the coming session of the General Assembly.

A spreading plume of saltwater already has contaminated wells on Hilton Head, prompting South Carolina officials to call for an immediate halt in roughly 80 percent of Savannah’s withdrawals from the Upper Floridan Aquifer that supplies residents and factories in portions of the two states.

“It’s probably not (going to affect) Savannah for another 100 years, but that doesn’t mean Georgia is not willing to take some steps now to manage the plume,” he said.

The governors of each state appointed a committee to work jointly with its counterparts across the border on a shared solution. Their first agreement was that each would conduct a study. South Carolina tracked the horizontal movement of the plume, and Georgia examined the vertical.

The committees haven’t met together in months, but South Carolina officials have relied on their report as the basis for renewed calls for action.

“There’s a lot of saber rattling, if you go back six or seven years, about South Carolina suing us,” Turner said.

Georgia has legitimate reasons for not immediately restricting withdrawals, according to Turner, including concerns that South Carolina’s environmental regulations prevent that state from taking similar action to share the inconvenience of the solution equally.

Another is exploring alternatives, such as syphoning out the saltwater, pumping in freshwater to create a dam-like barrier or other engineering efforts before committing to the huge expense.

Then there’s the question of whether anything would work, since Georgia’s study found saltwater was coming into the aquifer both vertically and horizontally.

“If you’ve got a natural, vertical, saltwater-intrusion problem, you want to know that whatever you do to address the problem is going to work,” he said. “There’s a sense out there that these studies are delays, but they’re not.”

South Carolina officials have grown more insistent in recent weeks, and Turner acknowledged Monday in reply to a Savannah lawmaker’s question that a new round of discussions is due.

“We probably need to set a time to meet and out of that set some time limits,” he said.

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