Sunday, March 7, 1999
Water resources need to be used creatively
By JERRY DANIEL REED
Senior Staff Writer
Water’s a precious resource in this semi-arid patch of
earth, and they’re not creating any more of it, state Rep.
David Counts observes.
Instead, the people who live here have to learn to use the
water that’s available more creatively. And that, Counts
will tell you, also means more frugally.
The Knox City lawmaker, chairman of the Texas House Natural
Resources Committee, played a leading role in the shaping and
final passage of House Bill 1. That legislation in the 1995 session
completed a statewide water plan for early next century.
“We’re a little late,’’ he said recently.
The water plan isn’t about developing new sources, but
about identifying those that already exist, and figuring out the
best way to use them to meet the state’s water needs decades
into the new millennium.
While the planning goes on over the next two or three years,
West Texans continue to use their inventiveness and know-how to
stretch scarce water supplies to the point of adequacy.
For nearly three decades, the Colorado River Municipal Water
District has been scrambling planes aloft during the warmer months
of the year every time a promising cloud bank appears in the skies
of the western Big Country.
Some think of the cloud-seeding program as a drought-breaker,
though that’s a misnomer, says Ralph Truszkowski, CRMWD engineering
manager.
“You’ve got to have clouds to seed,’’ he
explains. “It’s best used as a management tool when
there’s plenty of moisture in the air.’’ Thus,
not just any old cloud will do.
In the drought year of 1998, the CRMWD’s cloud-seeding
team went up 26 times, not much less than its yearly average of
30. But once the project meteorologist got a look at what was
up there, he canceled the mission after setting off the token
flares of silver iodide.
“Out of 26 missions, we only had five cloud formations
that were really favorable,’’ he said. The cloud-seeding
project, launched in 1971, has produced impressive results in
studies to date, Truszkowski said.
In comparison with a 30-year span before seeding on the same
15-county area, rainfall in the 25 years of seeding — as
few years were skipped for one reason or another — rainfall
showed a 23 percent increase.
And the extra moisture plus its timeliness increased production
of the area’s mainstay cotton crop 47 percent in the seeding
years, he said.
 Currently, the water
district and the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission
split the $120,000 annual cost of the project, one of six in the
state. The cost amounts to 6 cents acre, compared with millions
of dollars in economic benefits some scholars pointed to in studies
of the project.
Stonewall County residents hope to do themselves and millions
of other Texans living downstream near the Brazos River a big
favor by creating a salt-processing plant for the briny waters
of Salt Croton Creek.
These millions of gallons a year now flow from the creek into
the Salt Fork of the Brazos, thence to the Gulf through a series
of reservoirs.
With a federal Economic Devel-opment grant, plus some local
funding, the county will conduct a study for the proposed project.
If the project takes wing and produces potable water as well was
commercial salt, the communities of Peacock, Swenson and Jayton
are lined up to buy that water — a high quality fluid except
for the salts, said Stonewall County Judge Bobby McGough.
And because the Salt Croton flow has been estimated to deposit
half of the salt load into Possum Kingdom, the first downstream
Brazos reservoir, removing all that salt before it reaches the
Salt Fork would make a marked improvement in water quality in
Possum Kingdom and beyond.
McGough said the aim is to create a project that pays for itself
out of revenue from sale of the salt produced. It would be financed
by revenue bonds, not taxes, he said.
If the project passes muster, it will be two to 2¤ years
before the plant starts operations, counting study time and construction
time, he said.
The concept of drought is somewhat tough to pin down. To CRMWD
general manager John Grant, this area of Texas is in a perpetual
drought. The sticklers for definition, however, insist that drought
must be defined against what’s normal for a given area. Thus,
for a locality that’s dry to begin with, a merely dry season
counts not as drought, but normal climate.
Another key point climatologists make is that drought is a
natural event that recurs in cycles, not an aberration.
CRMWD’s Truszkowski said that by historical benchmarks,
this current drought should be on its downslide. He explained
that past droughts have generally lasted three or four years —
and this is the third or fourth year of the current drought, depending
on where and when one draws the defining lines.
“Last year, the Ballinger area had normal rainfall. You
can go up to Lamesa north of us, and they had close to normal
rainfall,’’ he said.
Counts, however, has heard of climate projections promising
two to three more years of drought. And that could lead to some
trying times for some less well-endowed Big Country communities.
But eventually, in the cycle of nature, this drought will pass,
too.
“The rains will come,’’ said Snyder water superintendent
Darrell Callahan. “It’s just a matter of when.’’
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Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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