Sunday, July 16, 2000

Abilene can take control of its own water future
(ARN Editorial)

Water is Abilene’s most precious resource. This was true in 1881 when railroad officials presided over the auction of lots to build a town and then looked around for a drink. And water has never been more vital to Abilene’s survival and growth than it is right now.

Because Abilenians in the 1930s had the foresight to construct the Lake Fort Phantom Hill reservoir, we often forget we have no natural water supply here other than rain. Accustomed to the conveniences of modern plumbing, we just want to turn on the faucet and have water come out without worrying where it’s from.

As the Abilene Reporter-News’ weeklong examination of our water situation indicates, however, nonchalance is out of date.

We aren’t as desperate as the desert-dwellers of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel, Dune, who devised special body suits to recapture every single molecule of body fluid. But our circumstances are alarming. Abilene’s water shortage is pinching our daily lives and creating legitimate concerns about the future.

Supplies limited

We’re entering our third year of drought with no end in sight. Homeowners are permitted to use outside sprinklers only one day every two weeks. Phantom has fallen as low as 18 feet below the spillway. Remaining water is being held to cover emergencies and to cool West Texas Utilities’ all-important electrical power plant. It won’t be safe to resume drawing from Phantom until it’s up to about nine feet below the spillway. Even with “normal” rainfall, it could be a long, long time before the lake regains that comfort zone.

Meanwhile, Abilene’s water is coming entirely from Hubbard Creek Reservoir, 42 miles northeast. We’ve been pumping a maximum of 30 million gallons a day from Hubbard, whose water is of lower quality than Phantom’s. But the city’s new Hubbard contract allows us a maximum of 28 million gallons a day from May through September and an average of 18 million gallons a day the rest of the year.

In winter, Abilene’s usual consumption is about 15 million gallons a day. In summer, that amount jumps to 40 million gallons a day if not more. With water rationing, we’ve arrived at the point in the city’s drought contingency plan where a further shortage will trigger a new stage of restrictions that bans outside sprinkling altogether. Where we might be forced to go from there is not pleasant to contemplate.

To guarantee sufficient water for Abilene residents to use freely, we cannot rely on Hubbard alone. The city is building a pipeline to the O.H. Ivie Reservoir about 50 miles southeast. When completed in two years, this pipeline will let Abilene pump in 13 million gallons a day on average. That will help, although Ivie’s water is of lower quality than Hubbard’s. But the Ivie pipeline is not the final answer to Abilene’s water questions. It’s one step in addressing a problem that will always beset us.

Competition for water

Abilene’s water outlook is not enhanced by realizing ours is no isolated problem.

Almost the whole Big Country is under stress. Large sections of the state have been declared drought disaster areas. Even in regions not so badly hurt by drought, long-range water supply is already becoming a preoccupation. Across the state, cities are fighting over rights to lakes, rivers and aquifers. The issue of redistricting, predicted to dominate the Legislature in January, may have to take a back seat to the politics of water.

In the context of this broad picture, Abilene’s borderline supply constricts our potential for economic development.

If our water supply is not really adequate for today’s population, how can we pitch Abilene as an attractive site for new businesses and employees that would put more strain on the demands for water? High tech industries, frequently advocated by developers as an answer to economic stagnation, require more water than the usual manufacturing plants. In Texas’ fight for economic development dollars, the cities that attract new businesses will be the ones that solve their water problems.

To grow and expand, Abilene needs more than just enough water for today — we need a cushion for tomorrow. If 40 million gallons a day defines high usage with our current population, we need access to 50 million or 60 million gallons a day. We must show business developers they won’t have to worry about encountering a big water shortage somewhere down the road. Right now, Abilene can’t do that.

The bottom line is that the current limitations of our water supply leave us at a growth capability of zero. Cities that don’t grow, dry up. It is imperative, therefore, that Abilene find a way to overcome its water handicap.

Unproductive diversions

In the public debate about water, diverse ideas have been put forth to address Abilene’s difficulties, but some appear to be less productive than others. Although back yard water wells might help individual homeowners, for instance, Abilene does not sit on enough underground water to reward wholesale well-digging. Enlarging Phantom by dredging, as has been suggested, will not put more water in it. Reservoirs should be dredged when water is escaping over the spillway. That hasn’t happened here since July 1997. We need more water, not a bigger hole.

Cloud seeding, to take another example, has been around for decades with, at best, inconclusive results. Agricultural areas might benefit from the spotty rainfall thus generated, but the unpredictable process has never been demonstrated to result in appreciable runoff for urban reservoirs, which is the kind of rainfall Abilene needs.

The city should probably inquire about the next closest reservoir, Possum Kingdom Lake northeast of Hubbard, but other water-needy cities have their eyes on it, too. Such competition is one of the factors that should nudge the Legislature toward developing a coherent state water policy, which it does not yet have.

Senate Bill 1, passed by the Legislature in 1997, seemed at first to be that policy. But by the time lawmakers were through with it, the makeup of the 16 water regions into which the state was divided left many Texans perplexed. The guiding principle of homogeneity, of communities of interest, appears to have been tossed aside in favor of the usual sort of gerrymandering that goes on when drawing up voting districts. Assigning Abilene and College Station to the same region makes no sense.

Subsequent court challenges to SB 1 have revealed gaps in the bill about issues revolving around the “rule of capture,” such as quibbles over the legal status of surface water vs. underground water and the private ownership of water sources. Overall, the main effect of SB 1 has been to pit one region against another, instead of fostering the cooperative spirit for which it was intended.

Abilenians should exhort the Legislature to formulate a sound water policy, but we can’t sit and wait for lawmakers to act. Abilene must look to itself, not “out there.”

What we can do

The situation in which we find ourselves directs us to learn to be environmentalists to an extent, to develop a new understanding of our relationship with the land and how it bears on the habits of our lives. We don’t have to submit to such extreme conditions as did the desert inhabitants in Dune. But remaining oblivious to our physical surroundings puts our way of life in peril.

Individuals and families, of course, should become more conscious of using water intelligently. Abilene homeowners, for example, should consider xeriscaping lawns and gardens. The City Council could require that all new residential developments be xeriscaped and also consider maintaining permanent water use restrictions, as many other Texas cities have deemed it smart to do.

Other good ideas will emerge from public discussion, but at least two courses of action to make a positive impact on Abilene’s water supply merit examination — protecting our watershed and reclaiming the tons of usable water we throw away every day.

Small watershed

Because Abilene sits in a shallow basin, the watershed that feeds into Phantom is small, less than 300 square miles. Natural features like watersheds aren’t determined by legislative decree, but by gravity and contours of the terrain. Thus, rain that falls west of Tye, north of Phantom and a few miles east of the city limits runs off elsewhere. Our watershed’s largest expanse stretches to the south, to Buffalo Gap and Tuscola — which is the very area into which Abilene’s urban development has been rapidly intruding.

The more water headed for Phantom that gets diverted, the more our watershed becomes disturbed and destroyed, the less runoff our reservoir receives, and the more our water shortage intensifies. What appears to be the city’s thriving, bustling growth trend, therefore, is actually self-destructive, placing Abilene’s quality of life and potential for economic development at risk.

Landowners outside the city limits dig tanks that fill with water that would otherwise flow to Phantom. When new tracts to the south are developed inside the city limits, developers are required to construct retention ponds to prevent flooding. Some water thus held back finally makes its way to the lake, but much evaporates and soaks into the soil. Some ponds become practically permanent features of the landscape.

To protect our water supply, city planners ought to be encouraged to focus Abilene’s development goals toward the west, north and east to prevent further interference with the only watershed we have.

In addition, city and county governments can join to declare war on the mesquites and salt cedars that proliferate throughout our watershed. Each single tree can consume 200 gallons of water a day — water that would otherwise be runoff for Phantom. Abilene’s watershed is home to thousands of them, and they multiply seemingly without effort. Trees help prevent soil erosion, but the main function of these mesquites and cedars is to suck up Abilene’s water before we have a chance to use it. On the North Concho River near San Angelo, an experiment is under way using herbicides to eliminate “unnecessary” plants and trees that absorb lavish amounts of water. If successful, this brush-control project could be a blueprint for Abilene and Taylor County to follow.

Reclaiming our water

Beyond protecting our watershed, the City Council and city manager’s office could immediately initiate a strategy to reclaim the millions of gallons of perfectly good water Abilene throws out day after day.

The city won’t have to start from scratch. Abilene Water Department officials proposed a plan to reuse water in the 1980s. Back then, City Hall thought it was too expensive. At this point, with the city poised to spend $60 million to import lower quality water from Ivie, the cost might not be considered so prohibitive. Reclaiming water is the most obvious way we can substantially increase the amount available for daily use.

While we can’t reclaim what’s expended on outside watering, anywhere from 50 percent to 70 percent of the city’s daily water usage — the Water Department figures two-thirds of daily usage, on a yearly average — ends up at the wastewater treatment plant. There, it undergoes cleansing according to rigorous state standards before being dumped into nearby Dead Man’s Creek, from where it makes its way toward Possum Kingdom. The wastewater treatment plant is licensed to process 18.5 million gallons a day, although it is capable of handling more.

Thus, Abilene daily throws away 10 million million gallons or more of water — as much, at least, as we plan to pump from Ivie. Can we afford to keep letting that much water flow out of our hands when reclaiming it would furnish a plentiful, continuing supply for the city?

This “effluent” water is cleaner, in the absence of organic impurities, than the raw water that flows into Phantom, let alone from Hubbard and Ivie. Water that runs into Phantom has passed through country creeks frequented by livestock and through the streets of Abilene, where it picks up oil, garbage and animal waste. Yet this doesn’t bother us when we turn on our faucets at home because this “dirty” water has been chemically purified at the water treatment plant. What we see are the results — clean water — and that’s what matters.

If water from the wastewater plant is organically cleaner than the raw water at Phantom to start with, then putting it through the purification process would also give us good water. Although the method of organic purification leaves trace quantities of some chemicals we’d rather not have in drinking water, those chemicals can be safely and easily removed. This could either take place by treating effluent water at a separate facility or by sending the water for reuse into Phantom and from there through the regular treatment plant.

Not fiction, but science

When we stop and think about it, all the water everyone in the world uses is recycled. Rainwater, which we commonly think of as “pure,” has been someone else’s wastewater sometime. The millions of gallons Abilene throws out every day sooner or later end up being recycled and used somewhere else.

For the Abilene pioneers whose most technologically advanced method to clean water was to boil it, a large-scale water reclamation project might seem as farfetched as the body suits in Herbert’s science fiction novel. But in the 21st century, purifying and reclaiming water is not science fiction.

It’s just science — applied chemistry. And the application of science and common sense affords a way to give us a permanent water supply to count on, one the city cannot easily acquire by other means. Abilene’s pioneering spirit is lagging behind many Texas cities — Lubbock, El Paso, San Antonio — that are already recycling water for a variety of uses. This is the route that the whole state will inevitably examine.

Unless Abilene pulls together and supports solutions like preserving its watershed and reclaiming its lost water, the city’s growth and the comfort of its inhabitants will remain limited by the amount of lower-quality water we can import from Hubbard and Ivie.

For decades, we have thought of oil and land as our most valuable resources. Now we realize it’s water. And if water is our most precious commodity, then we must focus on being wise stewards of the portion that is given into our care.