Reported in an AP story in "The Post and Courier":
WASHINGTON -- Sixty years ago, the late Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield resisted helping to pay for Lake Lanier, a new federal reservoir being built north of town. Atlanta had plenty of water, he wrote Congress. Thanks, but no thanks.

Those words came back to haunt Atlanta last year. A federal judge ruled that the city has been illegally tapping Lanier for years as its primary water source. Unless Congress reclassifies the lake as a water supply, the judge ruled, Atlanta will be cut off by 2012.

The question now is how many other cities might be in the same boat, according to experts interviewed by The Associated Press. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which sells water from 135 federal reservoirs around the country, recently gave Congress a preliminary list of 40 projects in 14 states that were not initially authorized for supplying water but are being used for that purpose.

Georgia leaders are trying to rally other states as allies in pursuing new classification from Congress for all the Army Corps' lakes. But the effort isn't gaining much traction. Many city leaders have a hard time envisioning water shortages -- just as Hartsfield did in 1948.

The Atlanta case, which was brought by Florida and Alabama in a 20-year feud over river rights, highlights a long-simmering struggle to reconcile the original intent of the reservoirs with modern demands for water. With water supply traditionally a local responsibility, the federal lakes were mostly built after World War II to generate hydropower or ease river navigation, often with private companies picking up much of the construction costs.

Only after rapid population growth has the corps, frequently under pressure from politicians, increasingly turned to water supply. The shift often has come on shaky legal ground, as U.S. District Court Judge Paul Magnuson found with Lake Lanier.

In his ruling, Magnuson noted that Congress listed water supply as an "incidental" use of the lake, thanks largely to resistance from Hartsfield and other Atlanta leaders. As a result, he found, the corps has been breaking the law by selling nearly a quarter of the lake's capacity to Atlanta.

Lanier now serves about 3 million people, but Magnuson said the spigot will be mostly cut off in three years if Georgia can't push a settlement through Congress -- a daunting task given fierce resistance from Florida and Alabama, which rely on strong river flows downstream for their own industries.

"The court recognizes that this is a draconian result," Magnuson's ruling said. "It is, however, the only result that recognizes how far the operation of (the project) has strayed from the original authorization."

According to the AP story Lake Hartwell and Lake Russell are in the same situation as is Allatoona and many others.