Atlanta’s Water Wars

Perched on the Eastern Continental Divide, Atlanta has always been a hard place to manage water—and to keep its waste out of sight. Atlanta’s Water Wars follows the development of the city’s water and sewer system from the postwar push for Buford Dam and metropolitan expansion to the Clean Water Act, civil rights battles inside City Hall, neighborhood environmental justice campaigns, and lawsuits. It opens with the spectacular 1993 Orme Street sewer collapse and uses that catastrophe to uncover decades of deferred maintenance, racial inequality, and fragmented governance beneath a booming Sunbelt metropolis. Tracing the rise and fall of a privatized water contract, the negotiation of federal consent decrees, and the multibillion-dollar “Clean Water Atlanta” rebuild, Eric Hardy shows how engineers, mayors, regulators, and activists learned—often painfully—to share power over an essential but invisible infrastructure. Atlanta’s water story, he argues, is a vivid case of adaptive governance in the face of a truly wicked urban problem.