The Georgia Water Coalition has named the planned withdrawal of water from the Apalachee River for an expanded Hard Labor Creek Regional Reservoir to its 2018 Georgia’s Dirty Dozen list.

The coalition labeled the proposed Apalachee River water intake “an exercise in overbuilding” and called on the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the Georgia Environmental Protection Division to turn down the current requests for the intake.

The Georgia Water Coalition is an alliance of more than 200 organizations, including the Greater Apalachee River Community, a group of Oconee County and Morgan County residents that organized this year to represent the interests of the Apalachee River.

“For the Apalachee, the aquatic wildlife it harbors and the people who live along and play in it, this proposed withdrawal creates other problems simply because it is super-sized for such a small river,” the report states.

The Hard Labor Creek Regional Reservoir is a partnership of Walton County and Oconee County, and neither county needs water from the project at present. For that reason, no treatment plant or distribution system for the reservoir has been built.

The proposed intake facility is on the Apalachee River in Walton County at High Shoals where Morgan, Oconee and Walton counties intersect, just southeast of the city of North High Shoals in Oconee County.

The intake facility would be used to pump water from the Apalachee River to the existing Hard Labor Creek Regional Reservoir at some unspecified point in the future, thereby increasing the water treatment capacity of a future treatment plant.

For more, visit Oconee County Observations.