Wednesday, October 18, 2000
Lake levels on the rise after
rain
By Samuel Segrist
Reporter-News Staff Writer
As Abilene emergency workers and city administrators
struggled to cope with Tuesday’s flood, at least one City
Hall department had good news to give.
The Abilene Water Utility predicted the
storm will raise the level of Lake Fort Phantom Hill by a height
of two to three feet, boosting it to about 15 feet below the top
of the lake’s spillway. It would be the highest the water
level in the lake, Abilene’s primary water source, has been
since June when the water department diverted water from a flooding
Clear Fork of the Brazos.
Water utility administrators estimated the
storm will add 5,000 acre-feet of water, or about 1.6 billion
gallons, to Phantom. Water director Dwayne Hargesheimer said the
figure could reach 8,000 acre-feet if the rain continues.
The city has been struggling through a drought
since 1998. People have been living with lawn watering restrictions
since August 1999.
About the only down note was the location
of the rainfall.
While a storm on the north side might have
saved the city a lot of flooding headaches, it wasn’t the
ideal rain for restocking the Abilene water supply.
The northern part of the city contains only
25 percent of Abilene’s watershed. The majority of the storm
missed the southern watershed along Buffalo Gap Road, from where
the majority of rain could eventually trickle into Phantom.
The nearly empty Lake Abilene and Lake Kirby,
which lie upstream of Phantom, were hardly affected by the rainfall,
Hargesheimer said.
Linda Simpson, assistant water director,
said the rain put the city’s water supply in a good position
for the fall and winter.
On Monday, Simpson announced that, with
the approach of fall, people could stop worrying about watering
their lawns. That doesn’t mean the usage restrictions are
lifted.
Water usage typically drops in the colder
months.
On Tuesday, Simpson also noted that with
the ground nearly saturated for the first time in years, any more
rain this week will drain easily into Phantom.
“This won’t solve all our problems,
but it helps us out a lot,” she said.
Contact city government writer Samuel
Segrist at 676-6744 or segrists@abinews.com.
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