The state of Georgia has won another legal case in its long-running “water wars” with Florida and Alabama. A federal judge sided with Georgia, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), and the Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority in a dispute over the allocation of water from Lake Allatoona.
The decision upheld the Corps’ 2021 decision to grant Metro Atlanta’s water supply requests from the lake and to allocate more of the reservoir to meet the long-term needs of Cartersville and Bartow County. The state of Alabama had challenged the federal agency’s ruling, arguing it would allocate too much water from the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa River Basin to Georgia.
In Georgia’s other long-running water dispute—this time with Florida—the U.S. Supreme Court also sided with Georgia in 2021, ruling that Florida failed to prove its allegations that Georgia’s water consumption from the Chattahoochee and Flint river systems caused the collapse of Florida’s oyster industry in Apalachicola Bay.
