{"id":18127,"date":"2012-09-17T16:21:53","date_gmt":"2012-09-17T21:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=18127"},"modified":"2012-09-18T00:29:07","modified_gmt":"2012-09-18T05:29:07","slug":"its-going-to-take-a-lot-more-rain-to-fill-the-highland-lakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/09\/17\/its-going-to-take-a-lot-more-rain-to-fill-the-highland-lakes\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s Going to Take a Lot More Rain to Fill the Highland Lakes"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_18130\"  class=\"wp-caption module image right\" style=\"max-width: 300px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/09\/17\/its-going-to-take-a-lot-more-rain-to-fill-the-highland-lakes\/dolly-gains-strength-as-category-2-hurricane-as-it-nears-landfall-in-texas\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-18130\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-18130\" title=\"Dolly Gains Strength As Category 2 Hurricane As It Nears Landfall In Texas\" src=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2012\/09\/82046021-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2012\/09\/82046021-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2012\/09\/82046021.jpg 594w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Photo by Dave Einsel\/Getty Images<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">While Central Texas saw good rains over the last week, it&#39;s not anywhere near enough to fill the Highland Lakes. In this photo, a man stands out of the wind during a downpour July 23, 2008 in downtown Brownsville, Texas.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>If you spent your Sunday indoors scrapbooking or just catching up on Season 1 of <em>Revenge<\/em>, you may have found a moment to wonder: It&#8217;s been raining all day. Are the Highland Lakes full yet?<\/p>\n<p>Lakes Travis and Buchanan, vital reservoirs for Central Texas, took quite a beating during last year&#8217;s record drought. Lake Travis dropped to 626 feet last summer, near historic lows. And despite some good rains this year that brought it up 35 more feet, the lakes are still less than half full.<\/p>\n<p>But as we<a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/05\/10\/how-much-rain-it-would-take-to-fill-the-highland-lakes\/\"> reported earlier in the summer<\/a>, you wouldn&#8217;t want the type of storm it would take to fill up the lakes in one go.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>\u201cAn individual rain storm like that would likely cause some catastrophic flooding,\u201d Bob Rose, a meteorologist with the LCRA told us. \u201cSpread out over two or three storms would be much better.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But a single storm that could fill the lakes isn&#8217;t out of the question. During the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.texas-fire.com\/2007\/06\/numerous-rescues-as-hill-country-deluged-by-rain\/\">\u201crain bomb\u201d of 2007<\/a>, nineteen inches of rain fell during just eight hours, filling Lake Travis. That&#8217;s the rare case, though.<\/p>\n<p>After Sunday&#8217;s deluge, where parts of Central Texas saw two inches of rain over the day, and rains earlier in the week, you would think the levels would show some improvement. And they have. Just not nearly enough to get back to normal.<\/p>\n<p>The\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lcra.org\/water\/conditions\/river_report.html\" target=\"_blank\">Lower Colorado River Authority<\/a>\u00a0tells\u00a0<em>KUT News<\/em>\u00a0that the water level of Lake Travis is <a href=\"http:\/\/kutnews.org\/post\/lake-levels-slightly-after-rainfall\">up a little over a foot.<\/a> While Lake Buchanan only saw a gain of a few hundredths of an inch. Lake Travis is still nearly 30 feet below where it should be, and Buchanan is down about 17 feet.\u00a0It could take a full wet season this winter to get the lake back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you spent your Sunday indoors scrapbooking or just catching up on Season 1 of Revenge, you may have found a moment to wonder: It&#8217;s been raining all day. Are the Highland Lakes full yet? Lakes Travis and Buchanan, vital reservoirs for Central Texas, took quite a beating during last year&#8217;s record drought. Lake Travis [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":18130,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[58],"tags":[61,140,31],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18127"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18134,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18127\/revisions\/18134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}