Thirsty City: Politics, Greed, and the Making of Atlanta’s Water Crisis by Skye Borden (review)

Skye Borden’s Thirsty City provides a concise, engaging historical overview of the paths by which Atlanta has reached its chronic water crisis. She weaves her narrative with a journalistic, highly readable tone and a multi-stakeholder perspective.

The first several chapters of Thirsty City are captivating, as Borden details the early history of Atlanta through a lens of lack of water planning, which emerges as a central theme of the book. Atlanta’s water management has been reactive from the beginning, a non-strategy of putting out fires as they emerge, literally and figuratively. The book opens with Atlanta’s origin as the terminal point of a rail line connecting Georgian plantations to the Tennessee River. While the Atlanta metro area has now sprawled to meet the Chattahoochee and South rivers, the city center is perched on the Eastern Continental Divide and is supplied by tiny streams. Prior to electrical infrastructure, fire was a major hazard in every city, but Atlanta was unique in its lack of an adequate source of water for firefighting. This insufficiency of municipal water culminated in General Sherman’s burning of Atlanta. During Reconstruction, a supply reservoir was established in the South River headwaters, which aided in fire management.

Between 1870 and 1900, Atlanta’s population quadrupled to 90,000. The use of flush toilets was spreading through upper-middle class populations, but the city provided no sewer system for the waste. Through a network of ditches, effluent from indoor plumbing in the high, dry white neighborhoods was routed into low-lying slums, which were home to large communities of former slaves. Those in power rejected the relatively new concept that water-borne pathogens were a major cause of disease, and Atlanta maintained a status quo of halfhearted waste removal practices. As a result, hookworm, roundworm, influenza, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and, in particular, typhoid affected the city, disproportionately ravaging the slums. Public health issues finally spurred the city council to pay for infrastructure, improving the situation for many. However, sanitation services were still not available to black residents, who also had limited access to medical treatment. According to Borden, there was not one medical facility in Atlanta that would treat a black person with a communicable disease. While many people were outraged by the injustice, a racist gubernatorial campaign in 1905 and the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 obviated any meaningful progress. As Borden phrases it, “the drum-beat of racism overtook the honest cries for sanitation reform, and race-oriented pseudoscience received as much attention as modern epidemiology” (p. 34). By the end of the 1920s, 80% of black households still lacked running water.

The next section of the book focuses on Mayor William Hartsfield’s efforts in the 1940s to convince the federal government to provide major engineering works on the Chattahoochee River that would serve the Atlanta region’s economy. Hartsfield unsuccessfully attempted to convince the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to convert the Chattahoochee to a navigable waterway, rendering Atlanta a port city. He then shifted tactics to ask the USACE to build a reservoir, among whose functions would be provision of municipal water supply to his growing city. This request led to Buford Dam, but Hartsfield backed out of contributing city funds to its construction, meaning municipal supply was removed from its list of authorized purposes. As Borden later details, the city would nonetheless come to rely heavily on withdrawals from the reservoir through short-term contracts with the USACE. This political maneuvering to save a million dollars at the time of the dam’s construction would eventually lead to billions of dollars of litigation and fines.

Meanwhile, Atlanta’s water infrastructure was proving inadequate. As Borden colorfully claims, “the city of Atlanta had become an organism that hemorrhaged harmful toxins...