Supreme Court sides with Georgia over Florida in long-fought water war

The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with the state of Georgia in its decades-long water dispute with Florida, a devastating blow to the Sunshine State’s attempt to buoy its struggling oyster industry.

Florida has long contended that the growing Atlanta area has soaked up needed water from the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers before it can reach the Apalachicola Bay, a once-thriving oyster region in an economically-depressed area of the panhandle.

In a unanimous opinion that reflected as much on ecology as the law, the justices said Florida had failed to show that additional flows from Georgia would have saved its oyster industry.

Florida has argued Georgia’s water use increased the salinity of the bay — a feature that disrupts the brackish water preferred by oysters and can encourage disease as well as oyster predators.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett said Florida failed to prove Georgia’s water use injured the state, writing that Florida’s own actions contributed to the demise of the industry.

“Florida’s own documents and witnesses reveal that Florida allowed unprecedented levels of oyster harvesting in the years before the collapse. In 2011 and 2012, oyster harvests from the Bay were larger than in any other year on record,” she wrote. “That was in part because Florida loosened various harvesting restrictions out of fear—ultimately unrealized—that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill would contaminate its oyster fisheries.”

“The record also shows that Florida failed to adequately reshell its oyster bars,” she added, a practice needed to help create habitat for young oysters.

The decision leaves little hope for Florida to quickly reestablish an industry that dates back to the mid-1800s. 

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission voted unanimously in December to shut down oyster harvesting through 2025.

Florida and Georgia first began fighting over water levels in 1990, though Thursday’s decision caps a case that has been litigated since 2013.