09 Jul The End of Drought? Not So Fast.

Recent rains in Austin might have you thinking the drought problem has been solved, or at least for the time being. Not so.

At last month’s Imagine Austin Speaker Series event, “Turning Panic and Apathy into Proactive and Sustainable Solutions,” several local water experts made it clear that our recent blessings are a short-term relief to a long-term problem.

“Don’t become apathetic just because the lakes became full, because the next drought is starting today,” said Greg Meszaros, Director of Austin Water Utility, at the Imagine Austin event.

As droughts get more and more severe, Austinites pay attention to their water usage, Meszaros explained. But when substantial rainfall occurs (as it sometimes does during droughts), residents turn their attention to other issues until the next big drought occurs.

“That’s the cycle that we have to break,” Meszaros said. Climate change will amplify weather patterns and intensify droughts, and the population in the central Texas region is only going to increase. So water conservation needs to be a consistent focal point.

Austin gets its water from the lower Colorado River basin, which is 800 miles long and contained wholly within the state of Texas. In times of drought, the city has a contract with the Lower Colorado River Authority to to draw heavily from water in the Travis and Buchanan reservoirs, which together can hold up to 2 million acre-feet* of water.

“We have been in a significant, multi-year drought,” said John Hofmann, Executive Vice President with the Lower Colorado River Authority. “… The water that we need to replenish our reservoirs over the last several years has not been falling within the watershed, with the notable exception being May.”

The month of May was 195 percent above normal in terms of rainfall, and was greater than the previous four year totals, Hofmann said. On January 1st, the combined storage of the Travis and Buchanan reservoirs was 689,000 acre-feet. After recent rains, the water supply more than doubled from the January 1st measurement, with combined storage of about 1.4 million acre-feet, putting them at 70 percent capacity, he said.

“It’s really good news on the water supply front,” Hofmann said, “but there are some things that we’re still actively concerned about.”

Historically in Texas, multi-year droughts have been relieved by short but intense periods of rainfall. In 1952, during the strenuous 7-year drought of the 1950s, heavy rainfall caused Lake Travis water levels to increase dramatically from their low point after a two year, intensely hot drought. But the drought continued for another five years after 1952, and lake levels again decreased substantially from consumption and evaporation.

“The four year period of this [recent] drought was much drier than any four year period in the drought in the ‘50s,” Meszaros said. But, reflecting the pattern of panic and apathy, “The drought of the 50s faded from memory,” he said.

Conservation

Texans brought their attention back to water in 2011 and ‘12, when severe droughts forced water conservation to be the apex of discussion for the city; during this time, water analysis, management and planning took the front seat.

Aggressive measures have been taken by the city and by LCRA to promote and enforce water conservation in this drought-prone region. Among those measures are incentive programs and benefits to reduce water consumption, the implementation and enforcement of water restrictions, and the diversification of the water supply (reusing water instead of treating it and sending it back to the river, for example).

One of the ways the city speaks to its residents about water consumption awareness is through a utility bill; as water consumption increases, so does the price of the water.

“[The cost of water] is one of the steepest inclining cost curves of any large utility in the nation,” Meszaros said, “and that’s to send you a powerful pricing signal to get you to curb those behaviors, or at least be much more wise about when you use water.”

So far these incentives have worked.

“Last year was … an all-time low,” Meszaros said of water consumption in Austin, “and this year will be even lower.”

Typically, as the population in a city increases so does its water consumption. But despite the city’s incredible population growth, Austin’s water consumption is lower today than it has been in years, Meszaros said. Last year, Austin used only 137,000 acre-feet of water, he said, “You’d have go to back something like 15 years to find a year that we used less total water.”

“And that’s a good trend,” he said, “That’s the kind of trend that we need in order to continue to be a community with a good standard of living and to prosper.”

Looking forward

Preventing apathetic behavior after rainfall is essential, both Meszaros and Hofmann said when asked about the future of water. It can be accomplished by engaging Austin residents in conservation efforts and planning for a future that will be even hotter and drier.

“To me, it boils down to talking about what we’re seeing in the basin, using the public domain to be able to have it out there in front of people who otherwise might not care, and reminding folks of the very cyclical nature of the part of the state that we’re living in,” Hofmann said.

“If we don't do anything and we just go back to old patterns and we don’t worry about any of this, certainly we are going to have a lot of problems,” Meszaros said. But he said he didn’t think that Austin would backslide.

“I’m very confident about the future of water in Texas as long as we make it a priority,” Meszaros said. “So no, I don’t see a time when Austin runs out of water, as long as we keep working at it.”

* An acre-foot is a unit of measure used by Austin Water and LCRA that is one acre of land flooded one foot deep, or approximately 325,000 gallons.*