Since a federal judge ruled in July that Atlanta has three years to stop using Lake Lanier on the Chattahoochee River as its primary water supply, Govenor Sonny Perdue has appointed an 80-member Water Contingency Planning Task Force to come up with a contingency plan. If Georgia’s court appeal fails or the state is unable to make a deal with Alabama and Florida over use of the water, Atlanta will be left with a water deficit of 280 million gallons a day.

The task force concluded that it is impossible to make up the Lanier deficit in three years, although the task force analysis showed that Atlanta could find alternatives, at a cost between $2 billion and $3 billion by 2015 to 2020.
 

These potential alternatives include a new reservoir at Bear Creek, Newton County which would provide 20 million gallons per day at a build cost of $780 per million gallons; a new reservoir at Hard Labour Creek, Walton County which would provide 40 million gallons per day at a cost of $1000 per million gallons to build; a reservoir expansion at Big Haynes Creek, Rockdale County which would provide 45 million gallons per day at a build cost of $305 per million gallon; a reservoir expansion at Tussahaw Creek, Henry County, producing 20 million gallons per day, at a cost of $250 to $260 per million gallons to build; Jackson Lake, potential water source for Gwinnett County, which has a sewage treatment plant upstream on the Yellow River upstream or South Georgia groundwater in area roughly ranging from Macon to Laurens counties, centered in Houston/Pulaski area, which would provide 200 million gallons per day at cost of $1,600 per million gallons.