Here in Atlanta, we're down to about three months of water for the entire city. Most of the state of Georgia, as well as areas in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and the entire state of South Carolina are in the midst of a severe hydrological drought. Now this is different from a meteorological or agricultural drought — we're a few months past both of those drought stages. In a hydrological drought, water reserves start to dry up (in our case, it's Lake Lanier), and different measures are put in to place to conserve the little water we have left, including total watering restrictions, and shutting down large water features (such as the Fountain of Rings at Centennial Olympic Park or the Coca-Cola Snow Mountain at Stone Mountain).

3,000,000+ residents. Three months of water. The economic, environmental and social consequences of that are a bit stifling.

Already, we've seen reduced crop yields and wildfires in southeast Georgia. The state's livestock is at risk. Our governor, Sonny Perdue, is currently at odds with the Army Corps of Engineers to decrease the amount of water that they're taking from Lake Lanier. Instead, the Engineers want to increase the amount for freshwater mussels in Florida. Due to a huge water main break at the University of Georgia, 500,000 gallons of water were lost. And don't forget one huge thing which a drought curtails — electricity production. With Christmas coming up in a few months, if the drought continues there may not be any water available to cool engines or provide sufficient coolant to the large displays of lights which pop up around the city.

Ironically, the drought provides a boon to one industry, an industry which some say have helped cut into the very water cycle of the city — overdevelopment. There's huge construction projects both downtown and in Midtown. Go to nearly any neighborhood in the city, and there's some form of development from a new subdivision to another condo tower (Buckhead, anyone?). When this happens, trees are cut down (and rarely replaced), grass lots are paved over and rain water is diverted to the sewers, preventing it from rising back into the air to produce — get this — more rain! This is fourth-grade science, and probably the topic behind the drought you won't hear on the nightly news about how water usage can be minimized. That's just my two cents.

Instead, we'll get told to take shorter showers and get penalized for watering our lawns. Yes, these steps do their part in curtailing the greater water usage, but why should the residents suffer the most when the commercial and industrial sectors don't have the same restrictions?

Of course, consumption could also be curbed by raising prices on water. And from the looks of my water bill — which has shot up from $10 in April to $50 in October — they're starting to do that. But how long will this continue? Meteorologists have yet to predict just how much rainfall is needed to really end the drought. And with October being the driest month on average in Atlanta, we might not see the kind of torrential downpour that's needed for reservoirs to rise back to safe levels. Otherwise, we may have to resort to more controversial methods of rain production, such as cloud seeding, in which amounts of silver iodide or dry ice are dropped into gathering clouds (the government did try this once in 1947…and it caused a hurricane to hit Savannah and cause $2M damage).

Or the more evangelical of you out there could just pray on it.

Regardless of how it happens, water is vital to human survival and we need it bad down here. Where's El Niño when you need him?

UPDATE: Looks like Gov. Sonny Perdue is planning to sue the Army Corps of Engineers.