I'm glad I live in East Tennessee. No water problems here.

I saw this coming 20 years ago. You can only have so much development with basically unrestricted water use. Texas, geographically, is a dry to wet state west to east. But, people want their green Saint Augustine lawns. Makes no sense. Everyone west of Austin should definitely have to xeriscape. Or, pay out the rear end for water.

It's not sustainable.

I can't remember where I heard/read this. It is not origional to me.

However, someone pointed out that the water usage in things that we don't think about/never occur to us.

For instance, all of the shelves inside of the "racetrack" of a grocery store (meaning on the aisles in the middle of the store) Liquid detergent, soft drinks, energy drinks, tea, a lot of the ready to drink coffee, & dare I say it....beer.
All made with water.

A lot of stuff in the dairy section contains a lot of water as well. Not to mention, the actual water that they sell.
Then theres the million other uses in industries that we don't think about day in and day out, sometimes that water is gone forever once its used.

Multiply that times the massive population increase that we have since the 1950s and its a huge drain on the natural rescources.

It only means one thing....we have to send the californians back with a new yorker under each arm.

Let me know when LCRA quits providing irrigation water to Golf Courses. And every other public water supply in the hill country.

O.G. said:

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I can't remember where I heard/read this. It is not origional to me.

However, someone pointed out that the water usage in things that we don't think about/never occur to us.

For instance, all of the shelves inside of the "racetrack" of a grocery store (meaning on the aisles in the middle of the store) Liquid detergent, soft drinks, energy drinks, tea, a lot of the ready to drink coffee, & dare I say it....beer.
All made with water.

A lot of stuff in the dairy section contains a lot of water as well. Not to mention, the actual water that they sell.
Then theres the million other uses in industries that we don't think about day in and day out, sometimes that water is gone forever once its used.

Multiply that times the massive population increase that we have since the 1950s and its a huge drain on the natural rescources.

It only means one thing....we have to send the californians back with a new yorker under each arm.

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that's extremely small potatoes. Bitcoin mining operations and data centers....kajillions of gallons of water per year.

isn't this why the junction boys training time was so rough? the practice fields didn't have any grass, it was so hot, etc?

SA rainfall is 30". But the standard deviation is 10" which is huge. 68% of years fall between 20-40" - which means a lot of years are under 20. We've only had 1 year in the last 6 with more than 30

My mother was born the daughter of a dairyman in 1940 in Solms, TX. At some point (and rather suddenly) the school in Solms closed, my mother began attending school in New Braunfels, the dairy vanished, and my grandfather went to work at US Gypsum. My mother never volunteered much information until I asked her about about 20 years ago, "What ever happened to the dairy?"

"Lost it due to the drought in the 50's"

She didn't say much else.

Mom still didn't talk about it much, but it was apparently pretty traumatic for the family as they had to sell off all the property and move to a much smaller place. The only remnants I knew about were the old Farmall tractor he used for farming and Ford panel truck he delivered bottled milk with. He refused to sell those. It also caused a rift in the family because the older kids had to work their butts off milking cows before the drought, and the younger kids got to grow up as soft-handed city kids. There was a little underlying resentment afterward.

And it's not even about all the water usage nowadays. A lot of the problem is that the state is becoming a concrete jungle, leaving nowhere for the rain to make it to the groundwater sources. It all flows right into storm water systems and off to somewhere it won't get used.

If more areas would start implementing reclaimed water for non human consumption, that would help. And then also more development of direct potable reuse (like El Paso has started to use) would be helpful.

zooguy96 said:

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I'm glad I live in East Tennessee. No water problems here.

I saw this coming 20 years ago. You can only have so much development with basically unrestricted water use. Texas, geographically, is a dry to wet state west to east. But, people want their green Saint Augustine lawns. Makes no sense. Everyone west of Austin should definitely have to xeriscape. Or, pay out the rear end for water.

It's not sustainable.

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Pretty much but I think you need to move that line east a bit. Like everybody west of I-35 & Hwy 77 on a N/S corridor that roughly runs from Gainesville down through Waco and Victoria to Rockport on the coast. You could even make an argument it should run from Denison down through BCS & Brenham down to Palacios.

And this might be another good time to bring up the desalinization plants being proposed and shot down around Corpus.

docb said:

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It kind of dispels a lot of weather myths to me. Like "It just doesn't rain like it used to". Makes you really wonder.

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There are always a few things that can be relied on to be said:

The good old days
It was better back then
Things arent made like they used to be made
Times were harder then
Times were better then
Etc, etc, etc.

The fact of the matter is that none of them are true, and all of them are true. Nostalgia and perspective change how we remember things, and a lot of times as kids we simply didnt know how hard or rough the times were because our parents did a great job at shielding us from those realities amd as we age our memoies often become what we make them to be versus what reality actually was.

Throw in the fact that our lives are often defined by events that are sufficient to etch permanent memories in - storms, wars, accidents, injuries, etc. and we get the romanticized version of what it was.

shiftyandquick said:

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O.G. said:

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I can't remember where I heard/read this. It is not origional to me.

However, someone pointed out that the water usage in things that we don't think about/never occur to us.

For instance, all of the shelves inside of the "racetrack" of a grocery store (meaning on the aisles in the middle of the store) Liquid detergent, soft drinks, energy drinks, tea, a lot of the ready to drink coffee, & dare I say it....beer.
All made with water.

A lot of stuff in the dairy section contains a lot of water as well. Not to mention, the actual water that they sell.
Then theres the million other uses in industries that we don't think about day in and day out, sometimes that water is gone forever once its used.

Multiply that times the massive population increase that we have since the 1950s and its a huge drain on the natural rescources.

It only means one thing....we have to send the californians back with a new yorker under each arm.

---

that's extremely small potatoes. Bitcoin mining operations and data centers....kajillions of gallons of water per year.

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Ag uses about 50% of the water used in Texas every year, mostly through irrigation in dry places like the panhandle, south Texas, etc.

Municipal uses about 35% of the water in Texas every year, but that number is growing.

Industry uses about 15% of the water every year (i dustrial, power, O&G, mining, etc). Expect tbis number to grow steadily as well.

Livestock accounts for around 2%

Another issue is the fact that the hill country has an unGodly amount of invasive junipers/cedars that use multiple millions of acre feet of water every year.

And it seems that controlling them has become harder and harder to o, with less people doing it.

BrazosDog02 said:

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schmellba99 said:

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Another issue is the fact that the hill country has an unGodly amount of invasive junipers/cedars that use multiple millions of acre feet of water every year.

And it seems that controlling them has become harder and harder to o, with less people doing it.

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Everything I read 8 years ago showed this was a debunked myth. I believed the same and started chasing a way to clean all of ours off our pastures, but my research and talking to local extension agents said it was a myth. Also, now watching the juniper and mesquite 'survive' during a time when our water table is low and it hasn't rained measurably where I live but twice this year supports the idea these don't really use or require as much water as people have been saying. Either way, unless the government is going to cover the 100% of the cost of removal and replanting something different, I wouldn't do it. But, I am absolutely interested in supporting studies and technical papers that show that these are actually a problem. I am not the kind of person that won't change their mind with new information.

Has that changed again with new evidence?

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Mesquite roots can go over 150 ft deep.

Juniper can go over 25 ft deep and 100 ft around.

It's not a myth that they use a crapton of water.

Elmer Kelton wrote a book about it- "The Time It Never Rained"

When I lived in San Angelo, he was a speaker at the A&M Club lunch. (Shout out to Zenther's Daughter)
When he got up to speak, he held up a glass of tea. Paraphrasing- "In high school, all my friends were going to A&M but A&M didn't offer a degree in English, so I choose somewhere else. I stand before you as a T-sipper."

First hand knowledge of the DROUGHT! I was a 10 year old share cropper's son in 1950 in central Texas.

The drought was very slow developing. No one could have guessed how long before it rained.

So my Dad borrowed money to buy 10 pairs, cows & calfs. 1951, it didn't rain! Moved cattle from pasture & baled a poor hay crop.

1952 Water tanks started to go dry. Grass & hay almost gone! Started to burn stickers from cactus because the cattle were eating the cactus getting terrible wounds.

1953 Ponds dry, watering from windmill water. Windmill water goes dry.

1954 Hauled water from neighbor well until it went dry. ....... you'd be surprised how much water a cow can drink!

1955 Gave cows & calfs away to packing plant in Fort Worth for $20.

!956 Sold three milk cows, last livestock gone.

Don't know how my parents with 4 kids retained sanity & made it through? I guess with Faith in God?!

1957 It rained & nearly washed away my hometown!

Yes, I remember, "The Time It Never Rained"

As my Dad said, "We're still here!"

Gig'em

I'll just say this and it's pure real life. When we bought our ranch in the hill country in 1992 it was basically a cedar ( Ash Juniper) jungle….with stunted, straggly live oaks trying to survive amongst them. Regrowth and virgin cedar trees. There were many places you could not walk through.
Lots of stream beds that the old landowner said use to have springs and water but were dry no matter the rainfall.
We had lots of erosion due to no grass or undergrowth under the cedars to hold or slow down any rainfall.
Because of all this I bought it relatively cheap.
I put together a plan to start clearing cedar. I planned to leave some of the virgin cedar for wildlife cover and travel ways. Of the total acreage I cleared approximately 820 acres of cedar. Took four years to complete it.
Almost immediately the grass and browse returned, two dry springs started running and made our creek start holding water…..and our stock tanks would hold water much better.
The other benefit was the live oak trees started getting very healthy and started growing again.
It totally changed the habitat and environment of our ranch which has held true to this day.

My mothers side of the family has been living along the lower Texas coast since right around Texas beat Mexico. My great grandmother was born in Rockport, she was part of the my great-great grandfathers second family as he lost all his children and first wife in a Yellow Fever epidemic in Point Isabel in the 1840's.

She spent the bulk of her life in Rockport and wrote both a biography of her father and a book about the origins of Rockport titled the "Old Beach Road", there is a historical marker in Rockport that talks about her and some of the original families. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=53767 They were forced to sell all the land near the Y that 35 does and where there is a big bank building now, or at least it was a bank last time I was there, that is another tale.

Relevant to the lack of rain and drought, she mentions how there were periods of extremely dry weather along the coast and in her journals and writings that our family kept she talks about some extended periods of dry and hot weather several times. So what you/we are experiencing is prolly not a new or unknown thing for the area. While the Coastal Bend isn't typically as dry as deep STX, it is still pretty darn dry and the native foliage bears that out.

Don't fret too much, the weather will change. Oh, and in her writings she also relates of periods of terribly wet weather that bred all kinds of mosquito borne maladies and general pestilence. Texas has never been for the meek!

Iconic Texas 1950s Drought Photo.

March 25, 1951.
Sam J. Smith, farmer in San Antonio's Belgian Garden district, raises his face in thanks and pleasure to the dripping skies. Rains which started Sunday ''.were Godsend to drought-plagued farmers and ranchers...''