The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

by Dan Egan

But the important and troublesome fact for Atlanta isn’t how much rain falls from the sky. It is how little of that precipitation then flows down rivulets, streams and rivers and into what is now Atlanta, which still sits atop a ridgeline, a very bad place for a major city to be. The driest spot on a roof in a rainstorm, after all, is the peak, where raindrops hit and immediately head, one direction or the other, for an eavestrough on one side or the other. Watersheds work similarly, and if you live in one of the fastest growing metro areas in the nation, one that is adding more than a million residents per decade, you’d want your city to be situated not on a ridge but near a trough, a place where waters gather and run deep and wide.