No longer.
About 16 percent less water is dependably available during drought in the lake system than previously thought, water planners said Wednesday. With the new forecast, officials at the Lower Colorado River Authority are coming to grips with the devastatingly low amounts of water that have reached lakes Travis and Buchanan the last half-dozen or so years.
The estimate has long-term implications for how much water can be sold out of the lakes and is likely to ignite an effort to find new water supplies.
There is no danger that taps around Austin will suddenly go dry, but it means the river authority can sell less water to cities and industry out of the lakes and other points along the Colorado River.
“We find ourselves in the midst of a worse drought and so our (dependable) inventory’s less,” said John Hofmann, who oversees water operations at the LCRA.
The river authority had estimated that the “firm yield” — the amount of water available during drought — at 600,000 acre-feet. That figure had long been the bedrock of water supply decisions, and it was based on the amount of water available from lakes Travis and Buchanan in the epic 1950s drought.
But with only relative dribbles of water flowing into the lakes over much of the last decade, the LCRA has now revised the river system’s firm yield down to 500,000 acre-feet.
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An acre-foot of water is roughly equal to the amount of water used by four average Austin households annually.
Water flow into the lakes was worse in 2008 to 2014 than in the worst seven years of the 1947-1957 drought, Hofmann said.
The revised calculation came as no surprise to professional water watchers who have closely followed the low inflows.
“It’s not going to change our course — we will continue to work through water issues methodically,” said Greg Meszaros, director of Austin Water Utility, the LCRA’s biggest customer, with a long-term contract that lasts through the middle of the century.
While Austin experienced above-normal rainfall in 2014 — 40.49 inches fell, or 6.25 inches above normal — parts of the Hill Country that are home to many of the creeks and rivers that feed the Highland Lakes continued to be parched. In Llano, for example, 19.6 inches fell in 2014, or 8.1 inches below normal, LCRA meteorologist Bob Rose said.
The announcement came during a staff briefing of board members of the nonprofit utility that oversees lakes Travis and Buchanan.
“In the face of this dire drought data, we can still meet our contractual obligations,” Hofmann told board members.
Currently 425,409 acre-feet per year of water is tied up in contracts with a variety of cities and industries up and down the river basin.
The most those cities and industries have ever pulled out of the river in any given year was about 250,000 acre-feet, in the intense drought year of 2011. But the water take could increase as the region grows in population and industry.
Meanwhile, the projected amount of firm water available could continue to decline.
“As long as the drought is going, the meter is running,” Hofmann said. “We will not have a final defined inventory, as it were, until the drought ends.”
Already, the LCRA board has taken maneuvers to ensure that communities and businesses depending on the water continue to get it.
For several years in a row, for instance, the LCRA has withheld water releases for most downriver farmers. And it has embarked on a water supply binge, investing more than $200 million in a downriver reservoir that the utility estimates will add 90,000 acre-feet of water even in time of drought and 10,000 acre-feet of groundwater in Bastrop County.
At the meeting Wednesday, board members and staff pivoted from the recalculation to talk about further amplifying the LCRA’s water supplies.
“We have that water to sell for many, many years to come,” said board Chairman Tim Timmerman. But he added, “It’s crystal clear we’re going to need to work on new supplies.”
“With a combination of historic drought and increasing population, it makes sense for them to get supplies wherever they can,” said Kodi Sawin, who consults with groundwater developers and utilities on water matters.
Board members talked less about ratcheting down water use among current customers.
While the LCRA deserves some credit for conservation, said Jen Walker, who coordinates water resources for the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club, the river authority “should take a larger and more proactive role in encouraging and incentivizing its customers to use water more efficiently.”
Green grass, no water?
Even as a bumper crop of wildflowers begins to bloom in Central Texas, fed by Austin’s above-average rainfall in 2014, the drought that started at least a half-dozen years ago continues to take its toll on lakes Travis and Buchanan. Water managers have long assumed the drought of the late 1940s and early 1950s was the worst-case scenario for lake inflows. The new worst-case scenario is now.