[Harmless Teddy Bear]

There’s a lot of water offshore from Savannah. It’s a little salty.

It is a solution. The question is how necessary in the long term would it be?

Yes it would be nice to have NOW. But droughts don't last forever. They rarely last more then a half a decade. So the question is whether the city is willing to make that kind of capital investment for a once a century occurrence.

[Sender]

I think water shortages will happen much more than once per century in the future if Atlanta and the downstream populations continue to expand.

Desalination would be very expensive, especially the startup costs and the building of pipelines. Maybe that's not necessary. Maybe just adding more reservoirs and better conservation practices will do the trick. Right now, given the fact of so little rain, a hundred more reservoirs would be sitting dry with no inflow. The idea of desalination from the sea at least will never go dry. Heck, according to Algore, the sea will be coming closer to Atlanta soon. Maybe we'd better build the plant at Macon ;)