All anyone can talk about around here is water.
“Did you get any rain last week?”
“Can you believe this heat?”
“Stay cool out there.”
After more than two months without a drop from the sky, the Austin area had a few brief scattered storms in the past week, but it hasn’t changed the forecast. Or our outlook.
“It’s our winter,” I tell my friends up north who offer their condolences. “We just stay inside all day. Reverse cabin fever.”
But the truth is that we can’t stay inside all day. Kids trudge back and forth to school on sweltering buses. Delivery drivers pop in and out of their trucks, dropping off packages from one air-conditioned house to the next. Roofers, farmers, landscapers, road workers cover themselves from head to toe to try to survive one day to the next. (And some state politicians wanted to take away their right to water breaks, a law that a judge this week deemed unconstitutional, thankfully. )
Plumbers, as we speak, are sweating under my house to fix a leaky pipe that has wasted untold gallons of water in the past 24 hours.
When the leak started on Wednesday morning, the steady stream of drops piled up almost faster than I could collect them and water the plants that are barely hanging on in our medicine garden.
My thoughts turned to where that water was coming from: Lake Travis and Lake Buchanan, our quickly shrinking reservoirs that provide water not just for the Austin metro area but farmers along the Colorado River, too.
I made the mistake of looking up the levels.
Lake Travis is dropping about a foot a week. It’s still 18 feet from the all-time low in 1951, but we’re inching toward a new record. (The lowest the lake has been in recent memory was in 2013, when it dropped to within 4 feet of the record.)
Lake Buchanan is an even larger lake, and its drought story is one that I thought would be worth re-sharing this week, below.
Before we get to that piece, I’ll share one more statistic: Lake Travis and Lake Buchanan are at 44 percent combined capacity right now, down four percent points in just three weeks.
The last time they were full was in July 2019.
A couple of updates to this story: You can’t get to the Fall Creek waterfall from the lake right now because the water is so low.
And the ruins of Bluffton are back.
On the home front, our leaky faucet is getting fixed, but I know I’m not the only struggling with this sense of doom as we head into yet another unending forecast of 103 degree days with no rain in sight.
For me, the only thing that makes this dread easier to deal with is naming it as climate grief and remembering that with death comes life.
I might not be able to see it right now, but with drought comes life, too.
Originally published April 3, 2022
To get to the spot where Fall Creek hits Lake Buchanan, you have to pass through a graveyard of trees.
Last week, I was visiting the largest of the Highland Lakes on the Vanishing Texas River Cruise, a boating tour company that has seen the lake’s highs and lows — literally — over the past 40 years.
Right now, the water is up at this reservoir that provides water to more than a million people in Central Texas, but if you’ve lived here long enough, it’s impossible to forget about the years when the lake wasn’t this high.
Back in 2011 or 2012, I rode on this very boat with my toddler to see the ruins of Bluffton, a small community whose residents were displaced in the 1930s when the Lower Colorado River Authority started building the dam between Burnet and Llano and flooded several small towns to make way for the new lakes.
That was my first drought. Before those dry, hot years, I’d never paid attention to lake levels. I’d never seen the bottom of the Pedernales River.
I’d never wondered how bad it might get.
I don’t live anywhere near these lakes, but I remember very clearly the sense of doom that I got from seeing these the shallowing waters and once-submerged settlements up close: What if the water didn’t return?
The water did return.
As I write this on a sunny spring Sunday morning [in April 2022], Lake Buchanan is 87 percent full. Lake Travis is 67 percent.
I remember those rainy weeks in 2014 and 2015, when the Colorado River finally flowed heavily enough to revive those shrinking bodies. To bring life back to the communities that depend on the lake for more than recreation.
We’ve had a nice run of years with full or nearly full lakes, but we haven’t had much rain this spring, and I hear nerves in people’s voices when they talk about the weather: Are we going to get a Memorial Day deluge? Or is this the beginning of another water drop for the record books?
Last week, as a tourist in my own backyard, each time the conversation returned to drought, I remembered that persistent dread that we lived with a decade ago.
I felt a little of that dread returning.
If the water can drop low enough that 30-foot trees grow on what used to be the lake bottom, they can drop that low again.
Our tour guide, Tim Mohan, who has been leading boat rides up the lake and the Colorado River for almost 20 years, says that those trees leafed out the first year after the water returned. (It’s surreal to imagine: Leaves growing on treetops whose trunks are fully submerged.)
He’s lived through enough droughts to know that they always end.
At least they have always ended.
But scientists say the Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which capture water from the other Colorado River, will never fill again. [2023 update: Even after the hurricane that hit California this year, Lake Mead is only up about 20 feet from its historic low last year. It is still 20 feet below where it was in 2020.]
Could that happen here?
Mohan thinks the water will return. He thinks those trees have decayed enough that they’ll wash away during the next flood, as if it is a certainty.
Is anything certain? What else will change during the next flood? What will happen to this area between now and then?
Since we can’t predict the future, let’s look to the past:
Some facts I’d forgotten about Lake Buchanan (and maybe you had, too): When the Buchanan Dam was finally finished in 1937, the LCRA thought it would take 10 years to fill. But the slow creep of the river filling this Hill Country basin didn’t stay slow for long.
A rainy summer in 1938 topped off the lake in just 15 months.
But by 1952, the town of Bluffton revealed itself again for the first time, thanks to an epic drought whose record water level lows still haven’t been broken — not even in 2013.
I can only imagine what a surprise it was in the early 1950s when people who still held memories of Bluffton heard that its ruins were resurfacing. Those people had already seen Lake Buchanan fill once, and in the years that followed, they would watch it fill again.
But once you’ve seen a lake drop this low, I don’t think you forget it.
But plenty of people in the Marble Falls area haven’t seen the lake this low. The whole region is experiencing what they call “the Austin creep,” and it’s easy to see those changes: subdivisions with rolling hills of rooftops, construction to expand the highways, billboards to advertise the businesses opening to cater to residents and tourists.
What will it take to get all those folks to understand just how volatile our water supply is? Will environmental pressures force us to face the undeniable damage that settlers brought to Texas as they laid the foundation for the society that we live in today? What will it take to correct the error of erasing Lipan Apaches, Comanches and Tonkawa from this history?
During my weeklong visit to Burnet County, only one person gave a land acknowledgment to name the tribes who called this place home and whose history has become something of a footnote in what is now a white, conservative area of Texas.
It’s amazing to think that just 85 years ago, this grand body of water was just an idea.
As we cruised this feat of human engineering, I thought about those trees that will one day wash down the river and the people whose homes were lost to this lake and whose names we’ll never know.
I thought about the fact that no matter how persistent something is — a drought, a real estate boom, a 2-mile-long dam — nothing is permanent.