Sunday, July 9, 2000
Water means survival for Big
Country
By Samuel Segrist
Reporter-News Staff Writer
It still hadn’t rained, so it was Don
Drennan’s turn to talk to God.
“Great Father, our land is in a terrible
plight. The very earth groans for water. We beseech you to send
rain in this time of great need so we may continue to grow and
live through your name ...”
Drennan claims no special pull with the
Almighty. His authority at the time came from his position as
a member of the Abilene City Council, and his invocation started
a March meeting on zoning codes and street names.
Drennan has since left the council. But
the drought continues.
His was one prayer among thousands. Teachers
at school breakfasts, business people at meetings, patrons at
cultural fund-raisers … few chances to make a request for
rainfall have been passed up.
But the rain drops somewhere else.
If a barometer could measure prayer, the
high pressure for rain would be setting local records. Storms
have brought some relief in the last two months, giving people
a tantalizing vision of life before the drought.
But the picture remains stark. The last
two years are the worst ever recorded for the Big Country’s
water supply — dating back to the construction of Lake Fort
Phantom Hill during the Great Depres-sion. And the area’s
population has never been this large.
It’s not just a local problem.
The Texas Department of Agriculture reports
farmers and ranchers have lost $4 billion in the last five years,
and the figure will probably continue rising. The state reports
117 communities are under some kind of water restrictions. More
cities are considering restrictions.
The drought has turned Abilene’s attention
and criticism to a water department forced to deal with a situation
engineers never predicted.
It has people noticing problems they’ve
been able to ignore for almost 20 years — the water supply
is finite, a drought can last as long as it wants, and there aren’t
many options left for a community that can’t get the water
it wants and has to have.
The reality has brought the city back to
the uncertainty of its founders, whose fortunes depended on enough
rain for that year’s crops or the survival of their cattle.
They often were left to look to empty skies and try to figure
out what to do next.
And the only answer many could find was
to pray.
Anyone would recognize the voice as a “little
old lady,” even if she remains unseen on the other end of
the phone line.
With painstaking politeness, she asks Linda
Simpson, Abilene’s assistant water director, what her weekly
day to water is.
“This drought is terrible,” she
tells Simpson. “I haven’t watered in years, but I’m
starting now. I’m just scared to death for my yard.”
And so begins a futile conversation. Simpson
attempts to convey that now is probably the worst time ever in
the city’s history to start putting water on a yard —
to no avail. The caller promises to follow the rules and says
goodbye.
“It’s happened several times,”
Simpson says.
Consumption and conservation
Abilene’s drought contingency plan
came out of a dry spell in the early 1980s that doesn’t measure
up to today’s aridity.
The city changed the plan in 1986 and again
before it was implemented last August. The council approved more
adjustments in March, and City Hall says it will probably look
at the rule again if Lake Fort Phantom Hill’s water level
doesn’t rise significantly before next summer.
Since the restrictions went into effect,
385 warnings and 1,112 citations have been issued to residents
and businesses for violating the code. The peak month was May,
when water usage jumped and officers handed out an average of
6.8 citations per day.
With at least $72.50 plunked down for each
of the 1,112 citations, Abilenians have paid at least $80,620
in fines. That doesn’t take into account the second- and
third-time abusers, who can end up with a $225 fine.
But the threat of fines hasn’t stopped
everybody. Some residents have programmed their sprinklers for
late night use when hardly anyone is watching. Some have snaked
soaker hoses all over their turf and watered continuously.
“It seems like every block has at least
one yard that’s suspiciously green,” Simpson said.
Still — so far, so good.
As most residents have watched their yards
come close to burning up, the numbers from the water department
show some good news.
In the first five months of 2000, water
usage dropped 21 percent from the same period in 1999 — before
the drought restrictions took effect. Abilene water customers
consumed 2.43 billion gallons from January to May this year. The
number in 1999 was 2.94 billion.
The drop is good news in the midst of a
drought.
Especially after 1998. That year, a record
3.2 billion gallons poured out through Abilene pipes. Water directors
say the restrictions have probably cut usage back to what they
consider normal.
Based on historical averages, this year’s
water use is about par for a year with normal rainfall, said Dwayne
Hargesheimer, who has served as the Abilene water director for
33 years.
In May 1998, a billion gallons were pumped
through the system as residents and businesses first became concerned
about the state of their yards. Concern about reservoir levels
had not yet taken hold.
Had the conservation measures immediately
gone into effect, Hargesheimer said, Phantom’s level would
be about the same. Most of the water would have evaporated into
the dry heat.
The average evaporation rate of water is
about 0.1 inch per day. Ten days without some kind of replenishment
means an inch — potentially millions of gallons of water
— disappears without finding its way to a treatment plant
and then a faucet.
“You just can’t hold on to this
stuff,” Hargesheimer said. “Wish that I could —
I’d market the process.”
But the immediate intent of the water conservation
measures has been successful.
Phantom’s lake level has steadied,
and even risen slightly after recent rainfalls. The lake is almost
16 feet below the spillway — barely below the trigger point
for the restrictions water customers are following.
The reservoir stands ready as an emergency
water resource, should the pipelines to Hubbard have to shut down.
Also, the cooling intake valves at West Texas Utilities’
lakeside power plant are safe for another year, plant engineers
say. If the level became too low, the plant couldn’t be properly
cooled and the city would have to cut back not just on water,
but its usage of electricity as well.
Hubbard Creek Reservoir, temporarily the
city’s sole supply of water, is holding up. Except for two
scorching days in a blistering May, customers have managed to
keep water usage below 30 million gallons a day — the maximum
amount Abilene can draw from the lake 50 miles away in Stephens
County.
Meteorologist George Bomar had been called
to talk to a group of gardeners, landscapers and local water personnel.
People sat expectantly in the room, part of the Texas Agricultural
Extension Service’s Taylor County office.
Bomar, who works for the Texas Natural Resource
Conservation Commission, is considered one of the state’s
experts on weather trends.
“I have some bad news,” he said.
The forecast calls for pain
La Niña, an abnormal cooling of the
surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, typically causes
dry weather in this part of the country.
“This is the strongest La Niña
we’ve seen in 30 years,” Bomar said.
The phenomenon formed in 1998 and isn’t
expected to break until the latter part of the summer.
Also troubling to forecasters is a “sunspot
maxima,” a period of increased activity on the sun, which
Bomar said also affects the weather. The effect is a prolonged
period of hotter days.
“We can’t go back far enough into
Texas history to know the combined effects of a La Niña
and a solar sunspot maxima,” he said, “but it’s
not very good news.”
The extended forecasts for the state show
La Niña breaking up and rain finally returning to the Big
Country around the fall.
But Bomar isn’t sure. He pointed to
the rains that hit the area early in 1999, saying the storms were
the final remnants of El Niño, the Pacific weather pattern
that causes the opposite effect of La Niña.
The rains came two years after El Niño
had broken. But the system continued to have an effect long afterward.
The same could happen with La Niña, he said.
The meteorologist said people should have
some hope. Long-range forecasts are not reliable, and the dry
weather could end tomorrow with the right conditions. A hurricane
could disintegrate along the Gulf Coast and send fragments to
the area.
The right kind of thunderstorm could drop
the right amount of water in the right place and re-stock the
area’s water supply.
But for now, the dryness keeps its hold
across the state. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
recently predicted that extreme drought conditions will persist
across West Central Texas until August.
Several meteorologists expected May and
June, which got most of the 8.59 inches let’s update before
publishing of rain Taylor County has received this year, to be
the wet months. The total is still below the average 9.82 inches
also update for this time of year.
City Manager Roy McDaniel was speaking at
a civic club meeting when he fielded the question, “What
happens if it doesn’t rain in the next three years?”
“Last one out, turn off the light,”
McDaniel said.
It was only a joke. Within days, letters
were sent to the Abilene Reporter-News calling for McDaniel’s
resignation.
Lights out
The water department has heard a lot of
complaints recently about numbers.
The price of the ticket was too high. How
many years until we build a pipeline to Ivie? How long will the
restrictions last?
Two numbers explain almost everything to
Abilene’s water director.
Hargesheimer points to a sheet listing how
much water has flowed into Phantom on a yearly basis since construction
of the lake was finished in 1941. The two worst years ever? The
last two.
Last year, 7,507 acre-feet made their way
into the reservoir. In the 12 months before that, 4,792 acre-feet
trickled in. An average year provides 49,700 acre-feet. In 1957,
the influx was 144,738 acre-feet, ending the longest drought in
the area’s history. It set a record that stands to this day.
Water directors speak in the language of
acre-feet because it translates more readily to their primary
measurement — the area of a lake matched with the water’s
depth. One acre-foot equals 325,651 gallons.
Combined, the total runoff into Phantom
the last two years is still lower than six of the 10 worst in
the lake’s history. To Hargesheimer, the previous record
drought of the 1950s seems bountiful.
“In 1951, they got 41,000 acre-feet,”
he said. “If I’d have gotten 41 in 1999, I’d be
in good shape.”
What happens next is that all water supply
projections get thrown out the window.
The Big Country is supposed to have droughts,
but not like this one.
Engineers have based their worst-case scenario
projections on the record drought of the ‘50s. To determine
how much they need, water departments can predict about how much
water people will use as the population grows. The only indicator
of how much water they’ll have relies on the worst of times.
But this is worse than the ‘50s.
“Now how do you cover that?” Hargesheimer
asked.
As the area’s supply stands, water
officials are anxious. But they aren’t hitting the panic
button.
Everyone has a worst-case scenario.
If a bomb blew up the two pipelines to Hubbard,
Phantom could supply Abilene at its current usage for about eight
months before going dry.
With no runoff whatsoever, Hubbard and the
O.H. Ivie Reservoir have about a two-year supply left before having
to cut back the amount of water they send to their member cities.
Of course, the two lakes receiving absolutely
no runoff is about as likely to happen as a bomb blowing up the
Hubbard pipelines.
“There are a lot of things that can
affect it,” said John Grant, the director of the Colorado
River Municipal Water District, which oversees Ivie.
Water on the brain
The end of the drought remains a question
mark.
But the foundations of its permanent effects
already are being laid.
“We don’t like this, but a lot
of times it takes something like this to get things done,”
said David Bell, director of the West Central Texas Municipal
Water District, which oversees the administration of Hubbard Creek
Reservoir.
During years of plenty, catching the public’s
attention for the coming needs of a water system is challenging.
Several water managers say they don’t like the public scrutiny
that comes from the drought, but they realize the worth of focusing
so much attention on the subject.
This year, Abilene moved on a million-dollar
water reclamation project that has been on the city’s back
burner for a decade. Water administrators hope to have an effluent
line hooked to the city’s golf courses by September, freeing
up about 3 million more gallons of water a day.
Surveyors are marking the territory and
drawing the blueprints for a $60 million pipeline and treatment
plant for Ivie water. Ivie will bring about 9 million gallons
a day to the city. It comes after a long discussion.
The Abilene City Council directed the city
administration to build the line quickly this year. The municipal
government had resisted the idea, saying the pipeline won’t
be needed once the drought is over.
Whatever the outcome, water managers have
started looking beyond Ivie for the next major source, which could
take decades to find and secure.
“Whatever we come up with, there’s
going to be a fight,” Hargesheimer said. The options for
relatively inexpensive water supplies are dwindling, even as the
state’s population growth continues to outpace the nation.
The end result is more people battling over less liquid.
By that time, water managers think, the
memory of the last two years will be on the public’s mind.
They hope no one forgets, once the rains
come again.
Contact city government writer Samuel
Segrist at 676-6744 or segrists@abinews.com.
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