Sunday, July 9, 2000
Abilene’s water sources:
Different sizes, same purpose
By Samuel Segrist
Reporter-News Staff Writer
Sayre Island, reached by driving over a
narrow dirt road — water to one side, mud and weeds on the
other — doesn’t show a lot of signs of its purpose on
Hubbard Creek Reservoir.
Behind the island’s single house, a
high-pitched hum emanates from a large metal building that encloses
eight pumps, each with an engine the size of a washing machine.
In the lake nearby, a tall concrete tower juts out of the water.
Two black border collie mixes greet arrivals.
The two pipes passing a few feet under their paws allow 115,000
people to get water 50 miles away.
Hubbard, one of Abilene’s three primary
water sources, will shoulder Abilene’s load for the summer.
Lake Fort Phantom Hill will probably remain offline for the rest
of the drought, barring emergencies, because its level is too
low. The water in O.H. Ivie Reservoir is inaccessible.
The three reservoirs are different-sized
replicas of each other. All of them exist in an area with no natural
lakes. Set in West Texas’ arid, rolling plains, their banks
are lined with few large trees but plenty of brush and cactus.
To visitors, the reservoirs may appear to
have been created more for fun than business. The boat ramps,
parks and lodges are far more evident than the small pump stations
contained in nondescript tin buildings.
But without them, the area’s population
and economy would dry up under the harsh climate. The Big Country
is almost totally dependent on reservoirs for its water supply,
as it has been since settlement. Abilene is especially dependent
on its lakes.
Attempts by the town founders to dig a well
for the city ran into a rock wall. They discovered the water table
beneath Abilene is too shallow and salty to supply enough drinkable
water.
The lakes themselves aren’t the best
place to store water. Open to the elements, more water evaporates
in the windy, dry atmosphere than ever ends up in Key City pipes.
“The only thing that’s worse to
store water in than a reservoir is no reservoir,” said David
Bell, general manager of the West Central Texas Municipal Water
District.
The reservoirs are the only option for cities
like Abilene.
Hubbard Creek Reservoir
Bell oversees the maintenance of Hubbard,
the second-largest of the three lakes. It’s also the most
developed. Creators built it in response to the record seven-year
drought that hit the Big Country in the 1950s.
At the time, Abilene was subsisting off
smaller lakes the city had built since the late 1800s. They weren’t
enough to carry the city through the dry times.
The great drought drove that point home.
Lake Abilene and Lake Kirby both dried up. One observer said the
city was “squeezing mud balls” to get whatever water
was left in Lake Fort Phantom Hill. The leaders of the cities
that would become members of the West Central Texas Municipal
Water District started looking for another source.
After the Texas Legislature created the
new water district in 1955, voters in Abilene, Anson, Albany and
Breckenridge approved the sale of $15 million in bonds for the
Hubbard project by the overwhelming ratio of 16-1.
Construction of the reservoir began in Stephens
County in 1960. It took 11 years before the lake started delivering
water to its member cities. Bell said the time span between construction
and connection is typical with large projects.
“The time depends on a bunch of things,”
he said. “You don’t want to make that connection too
tight. If we built something and then immediately built a pipeline,
it still might not rain. Then you end up with nothing to deliver.”
In an echo of recent arguments, Bell also
said a debate began between the cities as to whether the pipeline
was needed. For most of the 1960s, city officials felt their growth
rates weren’t high enough to justify the pipeline, he said.
The line was slow in starting, but some
parts had to be finished in a hurry.
In 1971, the pumps that furnished Breckenridge’s
main water supply became clogged and shut down. The pipeline from
Hubbard was still under construction, but workers laid the remaining
6,000 feet in one day to connect Breckenridge.
To this day, it remains a point of pride
for the water district’s workers that they’ve been able
to supply water for every request.
At the time, engineers predicted the lake
would adequately supply the area until 2025. Three years ago,
they adjusted their prediction downward — to 2020.
Hubbard has served as a backup source for
most of its history. As Abilene has relied mainly on Lake Fort
Phantom Hill, Breckenridge and Albany also have their own primary
sources. Only Anson uses the lake as a primary source of water.
Workers built the reservoir at the junction
of Big Sandy Creek and Hubbard Creek. When water flows over the
spillway, it eventually drains into the Brazos River.
The lake draws runoff from 1,085 square
miles of mostly undeveloped farm and ranch land. The two pipelines
that make their way from Hubbard to Abilene cross much of the
lake’s watershed.
The lake itself covers 15,250 acres when
full. Breckenridge is about five miles to the east, but businesses
have developed all the way from the town to the lake’s shore.
Residents take the welfare of the lake seriously.
“Most importantly, it serves as a backup
water supply,” Breckenridge City Manager Gary Earnest said.
“After that, it has a real economic impact for us. People
who visit the lake also spend money in Breckenridge or Albany.”
Lake Fort Phantom Hill
During the 1930s, Abilene received federal
funds for several projects as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
Depression-era programs. According to news accounts, the project
was the construction of several underpasses beneath the Texas
& Pacific Railroad’s tracks.
A lake north of town in Jones County was
the other project.
The awarding of the bid to build the dam
that would create Lake Fort Phantom Hill generated enough excitement
that the meeting on June 23, 1937, was moved from Abilene City
Hall to the city’s auditorium. News reports state that Abilenians
were happy that they would finally have a “real” lake,
as opposed to smaller, city-built reservoirs.
The cost of labor and materials was so low
that the winning bid ran $70,000 under the projected $300,000
cost. Construction, which began 1937, was occasionally stalled
by rain, but completed in October 1938.
Since then, Phantom has been the barometer
of the city’s water situation. A picture of an almost-empty
lake with the caption, “Abilenians don’t like seeing
this,” ran in the Abilene Reporter-News in the middle of
the 1950s drought.
Today the lake is dwarfed by the two other
reservoirs in which Abilene owns water rights. Phantom’s
278-square-mile watershed is one-fourth the size of Hubbard’s
and 11 times smaller than Ivie’s. Elm Creek, the main tributary
that serves Phantom, flows only during wet periods.
The lake is also the shallowest of the three.
The average depth when full is 13 feet, compared to 30 feet in
Hubbard.
The lake has increased in importance, if
not size, Abilene officials say.
If something goes wrong with the two 50-mile
pipelines to Hubbard, Phantom is the only water supply the city
can readily use. The lake also serves as a cooling pond for West
Texas Utilities’ lakeside power plant, and is therefore critical
to the area’s supply of electricity.
Phantom has become as much a part of Abilene
life as the T&P railroad. Residents visit its shores for fishing,
barbecues and a chance to swim. The place even has its own version
of the Lady of the Lake ghost.
The lake boasts the cleanest water the city
has at its disposal. And, when full, it can supply Abilene and
its other water customers with all the water they need. The problem
is it hasn’t been full since June 12, 1997.
Water has hovered at 17 feet below the spillway
for most of this year.
Water managers aren’t happy with that
condition, but it’s still better than the all-time low. Phantom
dropped to a record 21 feet below the spillway in 1984.
Droughts tend to focus attention on how
much water the city can draw from the one water resource to which
it has exclusive rights.
In 1984, the city paid engineering firm
Freese and Nichols to study whether the lake could be dredged.
The report said yes, but the expense would outweigh the benefit.
Last year, the council wanted to reexamine the dredging option.
The city again paid the firm to study whether the lake could be
dredged. The engineers again reached the same conclusion.
Both times, they expressed doubts whether
the lake’s small watershed could provide enough water to
fill up a larger lake anyway.
Back in 1984, water director Dwayne Hargesheimer
got so tired of hearing complaints from people who supported dredging
that he called a lakeside press conference. To prove the job could
not be done cheaply, he had a bulldozer start digging up silt.
The dozer took a few shovels of dirt and
bogged down in the soaked clay underneath. Another machine had
to drag it out.
When the council heard the second Freese
and Nichols report six months ago, it didn’t bother continuing
to talk about making the lake bigger. Instead, the council gave
an order — build the pipeline to Ivie. Soon.
O.H. Ivie Reservoir
Richard Halfmann drives his water district
pickup over the gray dirt roads that wind around the lake. A nearby
parking lot for the visitors’ center is deserted. Occasionally
the sound of a car speeding by on FM 1929 breaks the silence.
“Kind of out here in the middle of
nowhere, aren’t we?” says Halfmann, the reservoir’s
recreation director.
If nowhere is 10 miles east of Paint Rock,
the answer is “Yes.” The region surrounding most of
the lake is canyon-cut ranch land. And the absence of development
makes the massive lake, with a surface area of 19,200 acres, stand
out more.
A two-mile dam drowns the old junction where
the Colorado and Concho rivers once joined. Six floodgates set
amid the concrete center of the dam control flooding. The lake
itself fills the canyon the two rivers carved out and reaches
a depth of 118 feet in some places.
The surface of the reservoir is only 25
percent larger than Hubbard’s, but Ivie can hold almost twice
the water.
It’s a figure that looks good to water
administrators.
“The less surface area you have, the
less water you lose to evaporation,” said Hargesheimer.
More than 150 million gallons a day can
be pumped from the lake.
A pipeline that serves current users dwarfs
the one Abilene plans to start building next year. In 1992, work
began on a $115 million project to transport Ivie water as far
away as Odessa. It took three years to build the 156-mile pipeline.
The city of Abilene has already done some work to import the water.
The city’s pump station, designed to
pump up to 24 million gallons a day, will sit on the lake’s
north shore. In 1990, the West Central Texas Municipal Water District
paid for what is known as a “slope protection project”
to shield the future pump station from erosion problems.
When Abilene finally hooks up to the lake,
the city will be joining a crowd.
In several ways, half of West Texas has
some stake in Ivie. Of the state’s nine largest cities west
of Fort Worth, five have a claim to Ivie water. In addition to
Abilene’s untapped claim, San Angelo, Big Spring, Midland,
Odessa and Stanton are drawing from the reservoir.
Much of the region literally drains into
the reservoir. The sediment from the oil-producing and agricultural
country makes Ivie water the least pure of all of Abilene’s
water sources.
And the size of the cities already using
the water worries some officials. Some 305,000 people draw their
water from Ivie.
Ivie has been as drastically affected by
the drought as any other body of water. The amount of water in
the lake has dropped steadily since March, when administrators
estimated the lake had a two-year supply even if it gained no
rainwater runoff.
Recent rains that have hit West Texas have
brought some relief to Ivie. But in early June, the Colorado River
Municipal Water District reported the lake was 50.53 percent full,
down more than 5 percentage points since March. Even with two
rivers supplying Ivie, water administrators want more relief.
“It’s a large supply, but we still
have to learn to cut back our consumption,” Hargesheimer
said.
High tide
Curtis Dawson, code enforcement officer
at Hubbard Creek Reservoir, stands on the catwalk atop the lake’s
floodgates. The sky is gray with non-threatening clouds, and gusts
blowing freely over the lake hit the tall, stocky man full force.
The day is pleasant enough. The catwalk
offers a panoramic view of the lake washing against the dam, which
descends into the creek valley that eventually joins the Brazos
and makes its way to Possum Kingdom Lake.
“This place can really shake during
a storm,” Dawson says.
A metallic structure on top sits like a
lightning rod on a natural high point. Below, water at full flood
can rush through the massive gates at 750 cubic feet per second,
vibrating the structure.
While being assailed by strong winds, hail
or whatever else the weather throws, water workers must maintain
their balance and manipulate the machinery that opens and closes
the gates.
It’s a job customers don’t think
about while filling their dog’s water dish.
“Most people don’t have the chance
to come out here and see the pipeline or the pumps or meet Curtis,”
said Bell, head of the West Central Texas Municipal Water District.
“So they don’t really understand the work that goes
into starting from the raw source to getting it to their faucet.’’
Bell hates the drought, but at least sees
some good coming from it. Maybe, he said, people will notice the
reservoirs, built in fits and starts. Maybe the fisherman will
turn his head and notice the high-pitched hum coming from the
tin building on Sayre Island.
For Abilenians, it’s the sound of survival.
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Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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