Today, StateImpact Texas spoke with Larry Ogden of Hamilton Pool H20, one of two haulers that bought water from the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) in Spicewood Beach. The community doesn’t actually own their own water — they gave it over to the LCRA over a decade ago. The LCRA now owns and manages the wells, which began to fail Monday.
The LCRA says most of the water sold from the system wasn’t taken out by Ogden’s company. It was likely taken out by the other contractor, Hills of Texas Bulk Water, which hauled out 1.3 million gallons of water from Spicewood Beach last year. Hank Cantu, who owns the company, has not returned our calls.
Ogden agrees that his water hauling operation probably took out much less. “I would guess it was probably in the neighborhood of 60-80,000 gallons of water [last year]. Weâre not one of the big haulers in the area.” Ogden says his 2,000-gallon trucks would pull into Spicewood Beach, hook up to a fire hydrant, fill up, and then haul it off to their customers.
âGenerally, itâs for primary source of water for a home. Showers, toilets, maybe some drinking water if they have the proper setup.” Ogden says almost all of the water went to private customers within ten miles. And the LCRA didn’t charge him a lot for it.
“Waterâs cheap,” Ogden says. And he has a point. For the roughly 1.4 million gallons of water trucked out of Spicewood Beach last year, Ogden says the LCRA was probably paid a little over $11,000. And that’s if the haulers paid on the high end. Continue Reading →
The latest National Drought Monitor report was released today, and you can see a large band of white (that’s the drought-free portion of the state) elbowing its way into Texas, taking over most of Dallas and Tarrant Counties.
Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras are seperated by the Rio Grande and the international border. Neither barrier stops air pollution from traveling from one side to the other.
At first glance it might seem like good news. Carbon emissions in the US have dropped in recent years. Texas, the countryâs biggest CO2 polluter, has started turning away from coal as a source of electricity. But that doesnât mean the coal is staying in the ground. More and more often it’s shipped to other countries with weak records of environmental enforcement.
That trend is especially troubling for communities on the Texas-Mexico border.
In the rural parts of Maverick County all sorts of things still manage to move unhindered between Mexico and the US. Some welcome, some not. Residents like Rosa OâDonnell recall a day last year when the air was filled with smoke from agricultural fires.
“All the neighbors, we were out on the road driving, trying to drive back and forth down the road until the deputy stopped and said âdonât worry the fires are in Mexico,â O’Donell remembered recently. “Because we were worried.”
These days, smoke from burning fields seems like the least of their concerns. For around 20 years a site for a strip mine has sat essentially unused next door to OâDonnellâs property. The Mexican owners of the Dos Republicas mine are now ready to start digging. They want to ship coal to Mexico and burn it in power plants outside the City of Piedras Negras, right across the border. And while some people in Maverick County welcome the jobs that could bring, many, including city and county governments, are vehemently opposed to it. Continue Reading →
Spicewood Beach was placed under stage 4 water restrictions last week, meaning residents can only use water for cooking, cleaning and drinking. Now they are being advised to boil their water.
Just how much water was sold from Spicewood Beach, the place with the dubious honor of being the first Texas town to run out of water during the current drought? We now have an idea. The paradox is clear: just weeks before water had to be trucked in to the dry wells of Spicewood Beach, water haulers were trucking it out to sell elsewhere. To make matters worse, the community is now under a boil water notice.
The Spicewood Beach water system is owned and operated by the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), which manages water for much of Central Texas.
In 2011, the LCRA allowed two water haulers, Larry Ogden and Hank Cantu, to buy water from the Spicewood Beach water system and truck it out to others, according to an email from the LCRA to StateImpact Texas received late Wednesday evening. The LCRA says that they “have no way of tracking when the commercial customers took the water they purchased from the system.” But they do know how much water was taken out. And the numbers may surprise you.
At least 1.3 million gallons — and maybe more — were sold from the Spicewood Beach water system to those two customers. The LCRA says tonight in an email to StateImpact Texas that in 2011, 1.3 million gallons alone were sold from the Spicewood Beach water system to Hank Cantu’s operation, Hills of Texas Bulk Water. Another 3.5 million gallons were sold to Larry Ogden, who owns Wildcat Bulk Water Services and Hamilton Pool H20. The LCRA says they think most of Ogden’s water purchases were from the nearby West Travis County Water System and not from Spicewood Beach. However, they “donât have exact amounts for each system because this customer uses a portable meter on his truck,” the LCRA said in the email.
Even if the total is little more than 1.3 million gallons — and it could be far more than that — it’s difficult to gauge at this point how much of an impact those water sales had on the wells in Spicewood Beach.
When news first broke last week that the community of Spicewood Beach, about 40 miles outside of Austin, was going to run out of water within days, the blame was placed squarely on the drought by the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA). They’re the ones that own and manage the water system, as well as much of the water in Central Texas. âIt is all a function of the drought,â LCRA spokesperson Clara Tuma told StateImpact Texas at the time.
But there may be another culprit: Spicewood Beach’s water was for sale, as we reported earlier in the week. Today the LCRA confirmed to StateImpact Texas what residents told us earlier: that over the last year and all the way up until a few weeks ago, water was being sold from the Spicewood Beach water system to contractors and trucked out of the community.
So before water had to be trucked in, it was being trucked out.
The LCRA says that it had authorized two water haulers to purchase and truck out the water. On January 4th, the day the system was moved to Stage 3 water restrictions, they were notified by the LCRA that they could no longer truck water out of Spicewood Beach. “Since then the water levels have fallen substantially,” LCRA’s Tuma says. Continue Reading →
The extreme drought has lowered levels in Lake Travis, exposing formations not seen for some time.
As rains fall at above-average levels in much of the state in recent months, people are starting to ask the question: “Is the drought over?” (In fact it’s a search term that often leads to this site.)
And that worries people like Tom Mason, an environmental lawyer and former head of the Lower Colorado River Authority, which manages water for much of Central Texas. He says that Texas goes through cycles of comfort with water, then panic during drought, and finally forgetfulness once it has abated. Mason worries that once the current drought ends, we could soon forget how bad it was and fail to act now to plan for potentially even worse droughts in the future.
Photo by the LCRA
Tom Mason is concerned that once the drought is over, we'll forget it.
Mason spoke yesterday at the Driskill Hotel in Austin on the new water plan currently being considered for the state, and how Texas can handle more people and less water. Here are five things he noted about the water plan, which has a price tag of $53 billion and would provide Texas enough water until 2060, even through another drought of record:
Conserve, Conserve, Conserve. Nearly a quarter of the new water for Texas will come from saving the water we already have in the new plan. “It’s the fastest and cheapest way to make more water,” Mason says. And there’s little opposition to conservation, except for one: bad habits. “We Texans love long showers and green St. Augustine lawns in August,” Mason notes. But if Texas is to have water security, he says, our ways will have to change. San Antonio, he points out, has reduced its water usage by 42 percent over the last few decades, despite one of the fastest-growing populations in the country. Most of that conservation comes from new “the more you use, the more you pay” water pricing, repair of leaky pipes, and giving away water-efficient toilets. More regular, stringent water restrictions also helped the city conserve. Continue Reading →
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