Monday, June 10, 1996

Drought becoming part of everyday life in Texas

By CHUCK LINDELL
Austin American-Statesman

AUSTIN - Like Friday night football and beef on the hoof, droughts are a big part of life in Texas.
Major droughts sear this semi-arid region about once a decade, while shorter-duration dry spells rear up every few years.

The worst drought, the granddaddy of them all, stretched across most of the 1950s. It reduced dammed-up lakes to rivers, shattered the rural economy and turned small towns into near ghost towns. After at least seven dry years, nearly every county became a national disaster area.

The Great Drought changed Texas forever. Even 40 years later, water plans in every region attempt to guarantee water during a repeat of that dry spell.

There is no guarantee, however, that today's drought or any future dry spell won't eclipse the Great Drought in severity.

And when the Second Great Drought arrives, it will find more people using more water. Supplies will dwindle faster, sucked up by cities that sprouted with little regard to water availability.

Wells will dry up and crops fail. Jobs will die and families relocate. Many cities will restrict, then ban, lawn watering and car washing. Lake recreation will be a memory.

"We are going to have a worse drought. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when," said Mark Rose, general manager of the Lower Colorado River Authority, which offers water service to 33 counties, including Travis.

"The critical difference is going to be the economic impact. It's going to be enormous," he said.
Even without a seven-year dry spell, the far greater number of Texans can accelerate a drought's damage.

After less than one year of sharply reduced rainfall, the spring that feeds the Comal River is in danger of drying up this summer - something that didn't happen until the Great Drought's final year in 1956.

San Antonio, which lately has pulled about 230 million gallons a day out of the same underground formation that feeds Comal Springs, has almost 1.5 million people today, up from 588,000 in 1960.
"We are about to be in same level of stress right now that it took us seven years to get into," said Bill West, general manager of the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority in Seguin. "It's bad."

Despite last week's rains, water officials are refusing to call the drought over. In Texas, droughts are creeping disasters measured in months, and sometimes years.

"Two or three rainfalls are not going to come close to solving our problems here in Texas," Gov. George W. Bush said.

Even in the 1950s, rain fell periodically. But more often then not, showers were followed by dry, hot winds that sucked the moisture back into the sky. Within days, dust hung in the air again.

"What I remember most is the day after day after day of dry, hot, dusty winds," said Elmer Kelton of San Angelo, the celebrated author of 35 Western novels, including "The Time It Never Rained."

"There never was a time when it never did rain at all. It would always build up false hopes that maybe this was the beginning of the end," he said. "One of great things of life is that we can't predict the future. If we did, there would've been mass panic."

After the soaking rains finally came in 1957 - bringing floods, perversely enough - Texas went on a reservoir-building tear, creating new lakes to capture water to save for those non-rainy days.

Today, there are no great reservoirs under construction because permits are extremely difficult to acquire, the environmental impact is great and the multimillion-dollar price tag is high.

Texas will have to make do with the water it has, stretching that commodity thinner and thinner to meet a fast-growing population. Today's 17 million Texans are expected to swell toward 31 million in three decades. During the Great Drought, the state's population was about 9 million.

Conservation, water restrictions and miles-long pipelines will become a fact of life.

There are only two sources of water in these parts - aquifers underground and rivers and lakes above ground. Both are fed by rain.

Unfortunately, Texas becomes progressively drier the farther west you go.

"We do have a mismatch between where most of the water is and where most of the people are," said Tony Bagwell, director of water planning for the Texas Water Development Board. "That geography makes it somewhat difficult to meet the future water needs."

The state has designated the area from just west of Austin to Kerr County, including Blanco and Fredericksburg, as a critical area because the aquifer is not dependable in dry years.

In northern Hays County and southern Travis County, 35,000 people live over an aquifer segment where water levels drop rapidly during dry spells, putting many private wells at risk of drying up.
Williamson County is a relatively water-poor region that could exhaust its water supplies by 2030.

Most of Travis County is served by the Colorado River and its reservoirs, Lakes Travis and Buchanan. About 21 percent of the lakes' capacity is available for future use, but that water will likely be spoken for "sometime after the year 2025," said Quentin Martin, the LCRA's chief water resources planner.

One obvious solution would be moving water from wet areas to dry spots, and indeed Texas has begun an aggressive study to secure water until at least 2050 for wide areas surrounding Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Houston.

There is excess water in Texas. One of the largest lakes in the Southwest, Toledo Bend on the Louisiana border, is virtually untapped, Bagwell said. Other lakes have similar low levels of use.
"But getting access to that water is difficult, involving regional competition for water, political obstacles and the expense," he said.

Last year, when phase one of the state water study identified Lake Austin and the Colorado River as possible sources for San Antonio, howls of protest came out of Central Texas. The LCRA has vowed to fight the transfer, arguing that today's excess water will be needed locally in as little as 30 years.

The second and final phase of the state study will determine what water options are economically feasible. That will take until 1997 and '98.

In one of nature's ironies, dry weather not only reduces supplies in aquifers and lakes, it also increases the demands for water. Lawns, crops and livestock need watering with increasing frequency, drawing water levels down even faster.

It's a spiraling pattern that can put water systems, even those with plenty of water, in jeopardy.
High demand can push systems to peak capacity, increasing the risk for mechanical failures such as burned-out pumps. This summer, most of these problems should be confined to small water systems and utilities, said Mike Personett with the Texas Water Development Board.

"Major metropolitan areas are not going to be feeling the pinch for the foreseeable future," Personett said. "But all of them could if this turns into an extended drought."

Getting people to use less water is the fastest, cheapest way to lower water demands. Many cities are asking homeowners to water lawns once every five days. Last month, state officials begged Texans to use less water, from repairing leaky faucets to showering instead of bathing.

For golf courses and other high-volume water users, cities are increasingly turning to "reused water," a polite term for sewage treated and distributed for irrigation. Austin reuses water on three city golf courses.

Other options, such as removing the salt from seawater or treating sewage to drinking-water standards, are at least 10 times more expensive than using water stored in lakes. Water may become precious enough to justify that expense, but not in the near future, water providers say.

When conservation isn't enough, water providers have one last tool in their arsenal - mandatory restrictions.

San Marcos is on the verge of prohibiting residents from using lawn sprinklers or washing their cars. Leander, which will tie into Cedar Park's water system by mid-June, for now limits lawn watering to one day a week.

The LCRA will not guarantee more water than was available during the Great Drought. The rest of the stored water is called the interruptible supply. As the name implies, that water can be limited or cut off.

Rice farmers near the Gulf Coast account for about 70 percent of the LCRA's water demand, but part of that water is interruptible. If the drought worsens, the LCRA can inform rice farmers that their 1997 supplies will be cut back, Martin said. Farmers would have to adjust their crops accordingly.

The LCRA cannot curtail farm water use unless a drought exceeds the 1950s dry spell. "At that point, no stored water would go to irrigators at all," Martin said.

Martin emphasizes that the current drought is nowhere near the severity of the Great Drought, but state officials are taking little for granted.

Agencies have drawn up an emergency plan to aid drought-ravaged areas. There is also talk of relaxing water rules to let areas use substandard, but safe, wells.

Every plan for the future is shaped by the Great Drought of the past.

"You have an entire state under severe drought, and we are hoping like hell it ends tomorrow," Rose said. "But it could last for the next six years. This could just be the beginning."