ATHENS - Georgia's top environmental officer congratulated four counties on the long-awaited dedication of Bear Creek Reservoir, 15 years after planning for it began and more than four years after construction started. <br>
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Harold Reheis, head of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division and the featured speaker at Friday's dedication ceremony, told the leaders in Athens-Clarke, Barrow, Jackson and Oconee counties, ``You have done a great and wonderful and visionary thing for your communities, and for people downstream.'' <br>
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The reservoir began supplying water to the four counties this summer. <br>
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The dedication came nearly a year behind schedule, but it was right on time in another way, noted Jackson County Commission Chairman Harold Fletcher, who also spoke at the dedication. <br>
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The state struggled through an unusually dry summer as Georgia's long drought went into a fifth year, and the reservoir came into service just as streams began reaching low flows. <br>
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``It was very opportune that it came when it did. We would have been in a world of trouble this year,'' Fletcher said. <br>
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There are more than half a million acres of water in Georgia reservoirs, from 38,000-acre Lake Lanier in north Georgia down to thousands of small farm ponds. But municipal water supply reservoirs account for less than 2 percent of that half-million acres of water caught in reservoirs, Reheis said. <br>
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That's too bad, he said, because water supply reservoirs, combined with a state policy that aims to prevent upstream water users from sucking the state's waterways dry, actually help keep water in streams. That helps preserve life in the streams, and even more importantly, helps ensure that people downstream have water, he said. <br>
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Continuing population growth makes the fair sharing of water an important issue, he said, noting that the four counties that tap into Bear Creek grew by 30 percent in the past decade, and will likely grow that much again in the next 10 to 15 years.
