Because the ‘water war’ between Georgia, Alabama, and Florida isn’t really a war in the most literal sense, you wouldn’t expect it to have any casualties. Well, not so for the many bipartisan supporters of a bill that would have been the first major piece of weather-related legislation since the early 1990’s.
The Weather Research and Forecasting Act of 2015, which featured wide bipartisan support from both sides of Congress, passed the through the U.S. Senate on December 2nd and was expected to do the same in the House before being signed into law by President Barack Obama before Congress left Washington for the holidays. That plan was thrown into disarray when Democratic Florida Senator Bill Nelson introduced language into the bill mandating a study of the Apalachicola River system, the same one at the heart of the ‘water wars’ between Florida (and Alabama) and Georgia.
Nelson’s added section called for a study from the Army Corps of Engineers focusing on environmental protection, flood risk, and recreation in the river basin. Those buzzwords, funnily enough, match up concisely with the issues that Florida lawyers raised in the recent court battle with Georgia over water usage. Georgia legislators, obviously taken aback by the blatant attack, sought compromise by trying to add language regarding agriculture and drinking water, (their points of contention in said trial) but no such agreement could be found and the bill died on the floor.
Georgia’s Doug Collins said the added language was, “the latest in a series of attempts by Alabama and Florida senators to interfere in the ongoing tristate water wars through congressional intervention. I have maintained that Congress should not interfere in this issue, yet Alabama and Florida repeatedly try to tilt the playing field at the expense of Georgia.”
The original bill would have allowed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to partner with private companies to get higher quality weather forecasting information. This would increase the ability of the government to make seasonal weather predictions, especially useful when trying to predict natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires.
The bill is expected to return next year, hopefully without any bad-faith water resource language shoehorned in. Said committee aide Taylor Jordan of Nelson’s amendment, “If he wants to do that, he should do a stand-alone bill instead of doing it to a weather bill that for 99 pages has nothing to do with water.”
