Alabama's rivers are crashing.

Drying up in a short but intense drought, record low flows have been recorded at 17 federal monitoring gauges around the state, with rivers as large as the Tallapoosa registering an average of 1 percent of its normal November flow.

Another 12 locations scattered north and south on other rivers are at less than 5 percent of their normal flow. Numerous smaller creeks and tributaries have ceased flowing altogether. With the drought forecast to last through January, scientists are unsure where things might bottom out.

At stake is the survival of Alabama's unrivaled biological treasure chest. Alabama ranks first in the nation when it comes to the number of aquatic species in its waters, with more species of fish, mussels, snails and crawfish than any other state. There are more turtle species in the Mobile River system than in another other system on Earth. Biologists say this abundance, one of the great biological treasures on the planet, faces a potentially catastrophic threat as our rivers dry up from the one-two punch of drought and overuse.

While all 67 counties are under drought warnings, hydrologists say that more than just lack of rain is to blame when it comes to the record low flows. The hidden culprits are major industrial users, including factories, farmers, and golf courses, who are sucking the last drops out of the already stressed rivers and underground water table.

You would think it would be a simple task to tell those users to stop drawing water, or at least use less in the hardest hit streams, but in Alabama, that's not possible. Mostly because the state does not have a modern water management plan. There is no mechanism or law in Alabama designed to force industry or farmers to use less water in an emergency. Instead, state law essentially guarantees the right to water for thousands of property owners along our rivers.

But there is no similar guarantee for the creatures living in the rivers. In fact, for the last century, Alabama's rivers have been a sort of killing ground.

Our use of the rivers, for transportation, energy production, and industrial production together have conspired to wipe out more aquatic species than any other factor in the nation. Alabama has lost 90 species, followed by California at 53 species, despite the fact that California is three times larger. On top of the 90 species confirmed as extinct in Alabama, scientists believe an additional 90 species may have slipped into extinction as well, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service suggests more than 100 other species on the brink should be protected under the Endangered Species Act. Alabama has more extinctions than the surrounding states of Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee combined. For comparison, Mississippi has 11 confirmed extinctions, and Louisiana just nine.

For those 100 species on the brink, challenges such as prolonged drought may represent the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back.

"All of our rare species have multiple challenges that they face. Rarely is it one thing that sends them over the edge to an extinction event... It's usually a confluence of events that lead to extinction. You can think of it as a death spiral," said Scot Duncan, a biology professor at Birmingham-Southern College and author of Southern Wonder, on Alabama's biodiversity.

"For instance, a population may be geographically rare. Then an invasive species comes in, and the population drifts lower, then water withdrawals on the river reduce habitat, then a drought comes along and wipes out more populations," Duncan said. "Then you are left with one or two spots where the animal still exists, spots that are extremely stressed and finally, something gets them. It's like a person with an immune system problem. They have an issue that wouldn't normally kill a person, but something simple happens and sends them over the top and into that death spiral. That's what the drought can do... especially when it is coupled with a failure to manage the amount of water being taken from the rivers."

State law favors industry, not nature

At the heart of the problem is this: Despite pecking away at the issue for a decade, Alabama has yet to adopt a water management plan designed to protect the aquatic environment. State law is instead based on assuring that the riparian property owners all have equal access to water for irrigation and factories. Compounding the damage is the state's drought management plan -- a toothless tiger full of suggestions to limit water use, but no requirements to do so. The problem was on full display during Gov. Robert Bentley's press conference at Lake Purdy a week ago. Though a majority of Alabama counties are in a full scale "drought emergency," the best the Governor was able to do was ask "outdoor waterers" to cut back on their usage.

Compare the situation here to Georgia, which usually experiences drought conditions in concert with Alabama. There, state laws lay out a rigorous and highly detailed response when droughts occur, with concrete actions designed to limit water use by citizens and businesses. The plan begins small, when droughts are in the early and less severe stages.

As the official drought level is raised by state officials, further actions automatically come into play, such as restricting, outdoor watering to two days a week, and banning the use of water for ornamental pools, fountains, and power washers. If conditions worsen, no outdoor watering is allowed, golf courses are restricted in their water use, restaurants are only allowed to provide glasses of water to customers by request, and farms and businesses in the state can have their water use restricted or curtailed entirely. Every water permit issued in the state makes clear that "any permit may be suspended, restricted or otherwise modified by emergency order," of the Director of the Georgia Department of Environmental Protection.

In Alabama, no such emergency provision exists. State officials say limiting water withdrawals here would be a time consuming endeavor, requiring "either an individual court ruling" for each permit holder or the designation of a "capacity stress area." Under the state's current water use law, such a designation could be made if too many users were fighting over the water in a certain stretch of a river.

But such a designation has never been issued in Alabama, and the rules for creating a stress area include multiple scientific studies and a majority vote by the Alabama Water Resources Commission, which is comprised of politicians, factory owners, utility managers and other water users. Asked how long it would take to declare a capacity stress area, the Alabama Department of Economic and Community affairs (which supervises water use in the state) responded, "Since such a designation has never been made, there is no historical basis to make such an estimate."

More to the point, state law specifically states that a capacity stress area can only be designated to make sure all property owners on the river have access to water, not for environmental reasons.

"The capacity stress area is not a response plan. It is something to be used when users can't get water because the system is overtaxed by other users taking water. It is not an emergency plan by any means," said Mitch Reid, program director of the Alabama Rivers Alliance. "The capacity stress area designation, Alabama has never designated one. The law doesn't spell out how you would do it. It is a great unknown, not a solution. We need a solution to manage the drought we are in right now."

By contrast, Georgia's plan is designed to protect the rivers and creatures in them during drought, and provide an equitable sharing of the critical resource among the user groups. The need for a comprehensive water plan came into sharp focus in Georgia during the 2007 drought, the worst in 50 years, because officials were confronted with the possibility of running out of drinking water in Atlanta. But Alabama, with its much smaller population hasn't had such a "Come to Jesus," moment, said Reid.

"The history of the management plan is sort of the history of Alabama's droughts. We had the droughts of the 80s that really hit the farmers hard. Governor Hunt said we've got to do something, but nothing changed. Then another drought and another plan in the 90s, but still nothing changed regarding the rights to the water," for industry and farms, Reid said.

By 1993, Reid said, the state required large water users to provide an estimate of how much water they would use each year, "but there were no provisions to deny a certificate of use to someone if we were over capacity." The state has never had "any provisions for how much water should be flowing in the streams to keep them healthy, or how much should be allowed to make it downstream for the bay and the Mobile-Tensaw Delta."

The dilution solution fails

That lack of a rule requiring a minimum flow, said biologist Duncan, gets to the heart of the problem when it comes to the environment and drying up rivers. In Alabama, factories are allowed to dump all sorts of waste, from paper mill effluent to mercury-laced wastewater, straight into rivers, which are used as a sort of industrial sewage treatment machine.

"Our government has relied on the old 'dilution is the solution to pollution.' But that doesn't work when there is no water flowing in a stream," Duncan said. "When the rivers are running really low, any industrial discharge into the water has a disproportionate impact. If you have a business or plant permitted to put a certain stream into a river, it has a higher and higher impact the lower the water gets... We are seeing that on the Cahaba at Trussville, where almost the entire flow is coming from the wastewater treatment plant."

That is a stunning statement regarding a major river, that most of its flow is coming from a wastewater plant. It becomes even more so when you consider this: The Cahaba River is one of the richest rivers in the nation, with as many native fish species in its 192-mile run as you will find in all the rivers in the entire state of California.

Alabama plan: Pray for rain

In some measure, the governor revealed the state's plan to handle the drought during his Lake Purdy press conference, when he suggested that everyone pull together until it rains.

"The governor put in place a burn ban to try to save our forests. But that's it. We haven't seen any response to try to keep the our streams flowing. We have at least 90 more days of this drought crisis, and we still don't have a response plan that tells people what to do when we have an emergency," Reid said. "We have made our way from an advisory to a watch to a warning, and now 2/3 of the state is in an emergency, and we have never had any guidance from the state saying this is what we are going to do. That's an abject failure on every level."

State officials are making an effort to draft a new water management plan. That effort is entering its fourth year. It is a complicated business to be sure, managing the competing demands of navigation channels for barge traffic, Alabama Power dams that control flow for power generation, water-dependent factories manufacturing chemicals and paper, and farmers irrigating tens of thousands of acres.

In a statement, Nick Tew, head of the Geologic Survey of Alabama and the leader of the effort to draft a new water plan, said that five panels commissioned to address different facets of water use in Alabama have just completed their reports. Those panels addressed: "1) riparian and other legal issues, 2) instream flows, 3) certificates of use, permitting, and interbasin transfers, 4) local and regional planning, and 5) water conservation, efficiency and reuse."

Their work will be compiled into a report to the governor in coming months. "This report will be designed to provide contextual information, as well as potential next steps in the process that the Governor might consider," read the statement. "After review, Governor Bentley will make decisions as to what these next steps will be."

The timetable for when a new water plan might be approved remains elusive.

"Our rivers are being managed by chance, hoping for the best. These are are one of the state's most precious natural heritages. We are not just looking at the threat to biodiversity. We are looking at water quality for drinking water. Water quality for recreation. Water quality for quality of life," Duncan said. "We are losing a cultural resource and an economic resource, as well as our biodiversity. When a government doesn't have a plan in place to make sure our natural resources are being cared for, then the government is failing the people."