Water being trucked to dried up Spicewood, TX

Historic drought still lingers

Matt Dietrichson, Feb 02, 12.

As the historic drought continues, the Spicewood region is being forced to import water by truck, according to The Washington Post:

The 8,000-gallon water delivery arrived in Spicewood after it became clear the village’s wells could no longer produce enough water to meet the needs of the Lake Travis community’s 1,100 residents and elementary school, said Clara Tuma, spokeswoman of the Lower Colorado River Authority.

Several towns and villages in Texas have come close to running out of water during the driest year in Lone Star State history, but until now none has had to truck in water. Most found solutions to hold them over, often paying tens of thousands of dollars to avoid hauling water, a scenario that conjures up images from the early 1900s, when indoor plumbing was a novelty.

In reality, water still ran Monday through pipes and faucets of the Central Texas town, though the source will soon be different. Instead of being pumped from wells into the community’s 129,000-gallon storage tank — a two day’s supply of water — the already treated liquid will be hauled in from 17 miles away, treated a second time and put into the town’s water system.

MORE

Four weks before the crisis was apparent in Spicewood, the Lower Colorado River Authority was selling water that was hauled away by truck from the Spicewood Beach water system, according to the Austin American Statesman:

More than 1.3 million gallons were taken by truck and sold off in 2011, river authority officials said late Wednesday, but it’s unclear how much the loss of that water contributed to the shortage that forced the LCRA to begin trucking water into the Burnet County community on Monday.

LCRA spokeswoman Clara Tuma said the two water haulers were told Jan. 4 that they could no longer buy from the Spicewood Beach system. The river authority is no longer accepting applications for new water haulers, she said.

On Tuesday, state Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, wrote to LCRA General Manager Becky Motal, asking if water had been hauled out of the area after several of his constituents who live in the Spicewood Beach area told his office that they had seen water being trucked out of the community weeks ago.

Fraser, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, said in an interview Wednesday that his office had been following communities that might run out of water because of drought but that Spicewood Beach was not on his radar.

“If they are pulling water out of one system to sell to someone else and they end up running those wells dry, obviously that wouldn’t be good management of the system,” Fraser said earlier Wednesday.