🚰 A.M. ATL: Your sewage and you

Morning, y’all!

We may be the Peach State, but do you know what Georgia’s most valuable fruit crop actually is? No, it’s not the peach. That would be a diabolical trick question. It’s nearly as delicious, though. I’ll put the answer at the bottom of the newsletter. But first, I hope you’re ready for hardcore water discourse.

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TENDING TO THE PIPES

Credit: John Spink/AJC

Credit: John Spink/AJC

What can a billion dollars do for you? Gov. Brian Kemp has outlined an additional $1 billion in spending for critical infrastructure projects on roads, sewers, freight and more. He made the announcement at the Georgia Chamber’s annual Eggs & Issues breakfast, which must be a real bummer if you don’t like eggs or issues. (Civics and Cereal? Pop Tarts and Petitions? We’ll workshop it.)

Now, in my opinion there is nothing sexier or more fascinating than municipal infrastructure. However, these systems are cosmically unknowable by nature. Seriously, don’t try to understand them as a whole — you’ll end up with a whopper of an existential crisis. As engineering wiz Deb Chachra writes in her excellent book “How Infrastructure Works”: “The fabric of daily life is created from technologies that have outpaced our ability as individuals to fully understand or recreate them.”

Luckily, there are countless people in Atlanta and beyond whose job it is to help these systems run better. Kemp’s latest proposal would give $530 million to the state’s freight and logistics network, $250 million in local grants for road construction and $250 million for water and sewage improvements.

Water is definitely a weakness

Let’s talk briefly about the sewage and watershed management part. I don’t need to remind you of the unpleasant scene last June when failures in the city’s 80-year-old pipes left thousands in Atlanta without clean drinking water for days.

The city also has a terrible history with wastewater disposal, including a habit of dumping misused sewage into the Chattahoochee River — something we try not to think about in the summer months as we drift along in our kayaks and inner tubes.

Frustrated officials and environmentalists have a very simple hope for the future of the city’s watershed management: Stopping crises before they happen, rather than spending untold amounts to clean up afterward.

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Fun but honestly concerning water management facts to make you the most avoided person at your next party:

⛲ Atlanta has roughly 2,900 miles of water mains that, if laid end to end, would stretch all the way to Alaska.

🕰️ As of 2023, the Department of Watershed Management said they replace about five miles of those pipes a year, which means replacing the whole system could take … 580 years.

💩 For a while, the city’s preferred communal toilet was Piedmont Park. Yes, a 1994 AJC report revealed that, at the time, a single inch of rain would send 220 million gallons of raw sewage — enough to fill 220 Olympic-sized swimming pools — directly into the park.

Bonus fun* party activity: Do you know what watershed you’re in? Do you know the general condition of your local water sources? You should! Poke around the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Know Your Water” tool here.

(*I obviously have a very loose definition of the word fun.)

Not signed up yet? What’re you waiting for? Get A.M. ATL in your inbox each weekday morning. And keep scrolling for more news.

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MAKE ROOM FOR THE SATSUMA

Credit: Courtesy Franklin’s Citrus Farm

Credit: Courtesy Franklin’s Citrus Farm

Nothing will ever replace the noble Georgia peach in our hearts. However, a former Georgia cattle rancher has high hopes the state will warm to another cute orange fruit: Satsumas.

Originally from Japan, satsumas are sweet little citrus fruits with easy-to-peel skins. Joe Franklin, the owner of Franklin’s Citrus Farm in Statesboro, first tasted the fruit in 2009 in Louisiana and decided to try his hand at growing them here. What started as 200 satsuma trees has grown into a business that produces between 200,000 and 300,000 pounds of fruit annually.

Citrus fruits generally grow well in this part of the South, but it can get dicey if temperatures drop too much. The satsuma’s delicate skin also means they need to be clipped gently by hand during harvest. Jackson has expanded his business to include Meyer lemons, tangelos, navel oranges, gold nugget mandarin oranges, ruby grapefruit, tangerines, shiranui mandarins and even yuzu (another east Asian citrus fruit). He thinks citrus is an important part of the state’s agricultural future.

“I promise you, it’s going to be a big thing for Georgia farmers,” Jackson told the AJC.

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GA VOTERS HAVE COMPLEX THOUGHTS ON TRANSGENDER DISCRIMINATION

A new poll by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows a majority of Georgia voters think transgender people are discriminated against, with 65% of those polled saying trans people experience “a great deal” or a “fair” amount of discrimination.

At the same time, 70% of the 1,000 voters surveyed said they support Republican efforts to enact bans on transgender girls and women playing organized sports.

When you get past the numbers, some voters had more nuanced opinions. One person who spoke to the AJC said things like the age someone began their transition should figure into such decisions.

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A TIKTOK ALTERNATIVE?

The clock is tick-tocking on TikTok, which is set to disappear in the U.S. under a nationwide ban starting Sunday. Putting the politics of the decision aside, it’s going to be a huge adjustment, and perhaps a time for TikTok-addicted folks to recalibrate their social media usage.

Or, let’s be real. They may just go to a different app.

American users are now flocking to Chinese video sharing platform Xiaohongshu as a TikTok alternative. The app, whose name means “Little Red Book” in Chinese, is currently at the top of U.S. app stores. While there’s a language barrier — unsurprisingly, Xiaohongshu is set up for a mainly Chinese user base — a lot of so-called “TikTok refugees” are already settling in and engaging in a bit of a Chinese-American cultural exchange.

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MORE STRESS FOR APALACHEE

Credit: Courtesy Barrow School District

Credit: Courtesy Barrow School District

Students at Apalachee High School will now have to walk through weapons detectors to get to class. Tensions haven’t let up at the Barrow County school since September, when a 14-year-old shot and killed four people. Parents and teachers have been urging new safety measures, and those conversations were pushed up after another 14-year-old was charged with bringing a gun onto campus last week.

The new OpenGate weapons detectors were installed Monday, with other installations coming in the district’s two other schools. Fewer than 10% of U.S. schools use weapons detectors to screen students, in part because they’re so expensive. All in all, the Barrow County school board’s investment will cost a staggering $700,000.

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NEWS BITES

Georgia is in the bottom third of states when it comes to mental health

North Dakota and Vermont, teach us your ways :(

The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is celebrating Beethoven with an ambitious symphony series

You’d think the musicians would be sick to death of Herr Ludwig by series’ end, but assistant concertmaster Lauren Roth said there’s “always a revelation” playing his music.

Jacob Wilkins, son of Hawks and UGA great Dominique Wilkins, is taking fame and the family legacy in stride

The 6-foot-9 Grayson High School senior says it’s “kind of cool” that crowds and fans already know his name.

Starbucks reverses its open door policy that allowed anyone to hang out there

It used to cost nothing, and now it’s going to cost ………. a latte. (I’m so sorry.)

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PHOTO OF THE DAY

Credit: AJC

Credit: AJC

Imagine if you will: an expansive soccer center, with roughly a dozen full-size pitches and all of the training space a soccer lover could ever imagine. The AJC got an exclusive tour of construction on the Arthur M. Blank U.S. Soccer National Training Center, which is going up on time and on budget in Fayetteville. It looks like a bunch of dirt and grass now, but the $200 million center should be finished by next spring in time for the 2026 World Cup. The tournament will feature play in 16 cities across North America including, of course, Atlanta.

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ON THIS DATE

Credit: AJC

Credit: AJC

Jan. 15, 1945

From the Atlanta Constitution’s front page story: Operating with expert workmanship, safe-crackers looted the jewelry store of Schneider & Son at 109 Peachtree Street and escaped with $300,000 worth of gems — one of the largest hauls of this kind ever recorded in the nation’s police annals.

I definitely had to look up what “yegg” means. It’s an old-timey word for robber or safecracker. Now you know! (Also $300k in 1945 is equal to more than $5 million today. Ouch.)

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ONE MORE THING

It’s blueberries. Georgia’s most lucrative agriculture product overall, as of 2022, is [drum roll] broiler chickens! Just be glad we’re not the Chicken State.

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Thanks for reading to the very bottom of A.M. ATL. Questions, comments, ideas? Contact us at tellus@ajc.com.

Until next time.