{"id":343,"date":"2009-06-22T12:27:31","date_gmt":"2009-06-22T18:27:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=343"},"modified":"2009-06-22T12:27:31","modified_gmt":"2009-06-22T18:27:31","slug":"water-resource-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=343","title":{"rendered":"Water Resource Management"},"content":{"rendered":"

We happen to be in a county that chose to emphasize development over conservation, which has resulted in a water shortage here even greater than the climate would cause on its own.\u00a0 (It’s ironic that the best-known history of the county is titled Land of Good Water<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

For those whose county governments haven’t yet destroyed their water resources…here’s how it worked in our case.<\/p>\n

The county encouraged (with tax breaks for industry and developers) rapid and uncontrolled development, initially with no restrictions on well-drilling or amounts pumped.\u00a0\u00a0 Thus “on the cheap” developers sold former ag land as “ranchettes” of a few acres each, and every owner dug a well and put in a septic tank because there were no utilities supplied.\u00a0\u00a0 Water tables for shallow wells declined steeply as these private wells depleted the resource near the “ranchette” developments.\u00a0 Initially, wells farther away were still productive.<\/p>\n

Development created impervious surfaces that reduced infiltration and increased dirty runoff: the widening of existing roads, construction of new, wider roads, including regional high-speed tollways, construction of new commercial zones with acres of asphalt parking lots and large buildings, and so on, all reduced the area in which rainwater could recharge shallow aquifers on which the springs supporting local creeks depend.\u00a0 Developers also channelized, diverted, and in some cases filled in existing streams (changes in the law under the Bush Administration permitted developers to fill in seasonal streams.)\u00a0\u00a0 The water table of rechargeable aquifers dropped, springs dried up, small-stream (and later, large-stream) flow decreased in normal weather, but floods increased in heavy rain events.<\/p>\n

A major resource in this county is stone (half of it sits on limestone or sandstone with shallow soil over it; the demand for stone for facing houses in high-end developments and for all other uses rose, and more and more former ranchland turned into quarries.\u00a0\u00a0 Our county had one of the fastest growth rates in the country (as did a few others near Austin) with great demand for new housing and commercial building.\u00a0\u00a0 As quarries expanded and multiplied, this disrupted the larger water resource in multiple ways.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 More acres of land (thousands of acres in the western half of the county) were and are utilized as quarries, disrupting former\u00a0 shallow\/rechargeable aquifers.\u00a0\u00a0 Not only are volumes of porous rock removed, which had water in it and would hold water in future (the “water habitat”) but exposure of the neighboring stone to the hot, dry air sucks water out of what is left into the air.\u00a0 Underground streams and caves are disrupted, opened to the air (which today, for instance, is already 100F and climbing.<\/p>\n

Quarries also use water, as most of them have water-cooled stone saws.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Water discharged from a quarry operation may or may not be discharged in a way that allows it to re-enter the aquifer.\u00a0 As a result, rural residents dependent on wells have seen their wells decline by 50-70 feet per year in the past three years.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Within a mile of a quarry, springs dry up, streams quit flowing, and well-water levels drop.<\/p>\n

The person managing a small property for either agriculture or wildlife management has no recourse under present conditions.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Landowners must pay to have their wells bored deeper, to add the pipe.\u00a0 If their livestock or wildlife find no water in the old creek, if they have no water in their well…the county will get more tax money if they sell out to a developer.<\/p>\n

Arguments aimed at protecting the existing resource are always framed (by the county government, developers, and local industries) as an issue of “progress” v. “sentimentality.”\u00a0\u00a0 Their ‘solutions’ to Texas water crisis always seem to involve piping in someone else’s water from somewhere else, not conserving what’s here.\u00a0 (Austin is an exception, but even Austin won’t–or can’t–get sufficiently tough to stop commercial enterprises from using too much water on exotic landscaping and letting a good chunk of that fall in the street.)\u00a0\u00a0 The Texas governor continues to tout large surface reservoirs as the solution to the state’s water problem, in spite of the obvious fact that in dry years, millions of acre feet of stored water are lost to evaporation in our fierce summers.\u00a0\u00a0 He–and many others–are strongly opposed to setting real limits on water use, and looking for ways to protect the resource for the future.<\/p>\n

Adding to the statewide problem (and something that all “flat coast” states will soon share) is the sea-level rise predicted with continued global warming…as salt-water moves inland, it will also move underground, contaminating what are now a few coastal fresh-water aquifers (and displacing large number of people inland as well–all of whom need fresh water.)<\/p>\n

Any small-scale land manager either is facing, or will face, some stupidity from his\/her neighbors and local government on the matter of water resource management.\u00a0 In some states, for instance, the very sensible practice of using collected rainwater for garden use is banned because\u00a0 the water that lands on your roof belongs to someone else (!)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Here it’s legal (though not in all cities) but actively supported only in Austin as far as I know.\u00a0 Yet extensive and well-planned rainwater harvesting can reduce both urban water use and urban flooding.<\/p>\n

Wildlife managers have been using rainwater harvesting to supply wildlife guzzlers for years…for instance, in West Texas, where the desert bighorn sheep has been re-introduced successfully because it was possible to supply reliable water.\u00a0\u00a0 We use rainwater harvesting with purpose-built rain-barns and watering holes.<\/p>\n

I was taught long ago in graduate school that water resource management is the key to land management.\u00a0\u00a0 “Manage the water, and the land will manage itself.”\u00a0 (Almost, the prof then said.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Hence our checkdams and gabions,\u00a0 our planting of deep-rooted native grasses to hold the soil, trap silt and debris from the dirty water that flows across our land from the highway or someone else’s less-well-managed land.\u00a0\u00a0 But some things we–and other landowners–can’t control: we can’t prevent the development, the construction, that creates more impervious surface.\u00a0\u00a0 We can’t keep them from drilling more wells, or opening or extending a quarry.\u00a0 When animals that used to live on that land lose habitat and move to our land–we have tough decisions to make (can our land handle that many more?)<\/p>\n

Still, we can do our best to ensure that we manage the water we get–whether clean rain, acid rain, dirty flood runoff, etc–as well as possible, given our own acreage and slope.\u00a0 And we can try (so far unsuccessfully in our case) to educate the idiots in office and vote them out if they won’t learn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We happen to be in a county that chose to emphasize development over conservation, which has resulted in a water shortage here even greater than the climate would cause on its own.\u00a0 (It’s ironic that the best-known history of the county is titled Land of Good Water.) For those whose county governments haven’t yet destroyed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,6],"tags":[71,34],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activities","category-water","tag-activities","tag-water-resource-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":344,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions\/344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}