AIKEN - Gov. Mark Sanford says he will continue to meet with Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue during the summer about a compact between the states clearly defining their water rights to the Savannah River.

Now that both legislatures have adjourned, Sanford can move forward in trying to formalize the way the states share the river that divides them.

"It'll have to be taken care of at our level," Sanford said during a recent visit to Aiken. "If not, it'll become a feeding frenzy."

Five years of drought lowered water levels at Lake Thurmond, and officials almost stopped releasing water downstream in the Savannah River in 2002. The levels were just 3 feet shy of the point where the Army Corps of Engineers would stop releasing water downstream. The corps operates Thurmond Dam.

"We would probably not be able to meet the water-quality standards below that," said Bill Lynch, a senior project manager for the corps, which is about two years into a four-year comprehensive study of the river. "There'd be economic damages, environmental damages and water-supply problems, and we almost went there."

Officials estimate that 500 cities, counties, industries and businesses pull hundreds of millions of gallons of water from the Savannah River basin every year.

If the water release would have stopped, state Department of Natural Resources hydrologist Bud Badr said the Aiken and Augusta, Ga., area would have been unable to pull from the Savannah within days.

"The water that we had 100 years ago is more or less the same as we have now," Badr said. "However, the demand for that water is growing all the time."

The South has been blessed with an abundance of water, Badr said. Western states and crowded Northern states already have battled over water rights, often in court.

Judges have historically ruled in favor of basic needs such as drinking water over industrial growth, said Stephen Spitz, a University of South Carolina professor who served on Sanford's water law review committee.

"It would be in the interest of each state to very carefully look at what it's using the water for," Spitz said. "We need to be certain about what rights we have. It's pretty clear that there's going to come a time when we have to do something."

Guarding South Carolina's share of the river is especially important because the state uses far less water than Georgia, Sanford's review committee noted in its report released in April.

"It's about time that we have 50 percent of the assimilative capacity of the river," Badr said.

There is fear that cities such as Atlanta will take coveted water from the Savannah River that nearby residents depend on.

But a 16-county metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District, formed three years ago, outlined the region's needs and didn't include the Savannah to meet them, said Napoleon Caldwell, the senior planning and policy adviser for the Georgia Environmental Protection Division.

By law, he said, Atlanta couldn't even consider tapping into the Savannah until 2030.

"It is far, far, far more possible that the removal of water to meet needs outside the basin will happen on the South Carolina side than the Georgia side," Caldwell said.