A Charred Life 
The Last Drop
The good news is that Texas has an incredibly detailed plan for how to deal with the looming shortfalls in every one of its major urban areas. The bad news is that you can’t drink a plan.
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The board continued to meet, and its strategies grew more sophisticated, but by the late eighties it had become clear that its plans were not being acted on sufficiently. The planners in Austin were planning, but people in the rest of the state weren’t paying much attention. The short but viciously harsh drought of 1996 changed all that, leading directly to the unprecedented 1997 law requiring the regions of the state to come up with their own fifty-year plans. It also said that in order to be approved, any water rights or projects had to be included in the state water plan. It wasn’t until a decade later, however, that the water board got some real teeth. Legislation spearheaded by Republican senator Kip Averitt, of Waco, in 2007 gave the state the power to actually finance water projects, including more than three quarters of a billion dollars’ worth now in development. The water board now had some control over what got built and what didn’t. The bill also gave priorities in financing to cities with conservation plans and set in motion a process to establish a minimum “environmental flow” (or, an acceptable water level) for every stream and river in the state. These may sound like modest advances. In the world of water management, they were landmarks.
What all of this means is that there is, in fact, a plan for how to slake Region C’s thirst. It consists of four main strategies, staged to kick in at intervals over the next forty years: (1) Build four big reservoirs; (2) build pipelines to six lakes that are not currently hooked up to Metroplex water systems; (3) reuse wastewater, both in irrigation and cooling systems and by recycling it through rivers and wetlands; and (4) use less water (in the plan, conservation accounts for 11 percent of the future water supply).
On paper this plan looks sensible. Most of the water in the state is in East Texas—which gets 50 to 60 inches of rain per year, compared with the Metroplex’s 36 inches—so it makes sense for the big suppliers to look there for new water. It makes sense to build new reservoirs to hold that new water and to build new lines to pipe it to Region C. It makes sense to reuse water and to promote conservation. But in spite of how reasonable the TWDB’s plan might seem, it is going to be brutally difficult to carry out. Even to call it a plan may be inaccurate, since planning carries a certain expectation of accomplishment. Perhaps “vision” would be a better word. The TWDB’s problem, and ours, is that its vision is not shared by everyone. There are, in fact, significant disagreements over how the agency assesses our future water needs and how it proposes to satisfy them.
One of the best ways to understand the hurdles Region C’s water plan will have to overcome is to head for the bottomlands of the Sulphur River, about fifty miles outside Texarkana, in northeast Texas. Few of this area’s tiny communities can be found on a map. It is a place of small farms and ranches, dirt roads and oak forests, pastures and lovely rolling post oak savanna. It is also a land of creeks and sloughs and floodplains and the lush hardwood river bottom, and this has made it a big part of the proposed solution to the looming urban water shortages in the Metroplex. Region C’s basic strategy for the next half a century is quite simple: Lay pipelines eastward, to the rain-rich and relatively unpopulated regions of East Texas, where large dams and reservoirs will be built. The largest of these, by far, is the proposed Marvin Nichols Reservoir. At 72,000 acres (113 square miles), it would radically transform the Sulphur River area. Water planners insist that without it, Region C’s future will be in grave danger.
That’s not how Max Shumake sees it. Last November, I toured the river bottom with him from his hunting camp, a pretty place with an ancient single-wide, a couple of ATVs, and some chairs and tables with rifles spread across them. A dead bobcat hung splayed upside down from an old oak tree. Shumake and his family own 797 acres here. His view of what will happen to this land if Marvin Nichols gets built is stark. “Nothing that you see here will remain,” he said ruefully. “Cemeteries, churches, farms, ranches, and families that have been here for five generations. A healthy timber industry. Where you are standing now will be nine feet underwater.”
Shumake is the president of the Sulphur River Oversight Society (SOS), a local landowner group formed to oppose Marvin Nichols. It now claims six thousand members, the support of every state legislator in the area, and the backing of such environmental powerhouses as the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation. SOS and other reservoir opponents say that between the 72,000-acre lake and an additional 163,000 acres of federally mandated environmental “mitigation,” the Marvin Nichols project will not only destroy ranches and farms of multigenerational residents but also obliterate wildlife habitat, submerge 30,000 acres of rare hardwood bottomlands, and disrupt more than forty miles of a river that has already been dammed twice. The local timber industry would lose up to 1,300 jobs and $275 million in annual revenue, according to the Texas Forest Service.
“We just don’t think it is fair,” said Shumake, “to ask us to give up everything so that North Texas can put up to sixty percent of its water into watering lawns.”
His argument has two parts: (1) Dallas and Fort Worth consume water at a rate well above other big Texas cities and want to build new reservoirs only to avoid having to adopt more-difficult measures, such as limiting lawn watering (which on summer days does indeed account for 60 percent of all municipal use), and (2) there are other untapped sources of surface water, such as Toledo Bend Reservoir, on the Sabine River; Lake Texoma, on the Oklahoma border; and Wright Patman Lake, farther downstream on the Sulphur River, that should be used first. Shumake may be a country boy, but last spring his group and its allies showed their political muscle, causing a major fight in the state legislature over the preliminary designation of the four reservoir sites. They lost that fight but sent a clear message: Dallas and Fort Worth are in for a long, bloody struggle over the building of Marvin Nichols.
It will be even harder to build Fastrill Reservoir, another of the state’s proposed water sources, located about 130 miles due south of Shumake’s camp, on the upper Neches River. City of Dallas water planners have coveted the upper Neches for damming and impoundment. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) beat them to the punch by declaring it part of a national wildlife refuge in 2006. Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Water Development Board were furious, warning that the future of Dallas’s water supplies was at risk and that the feds were intruding into state water policy. In response, both the City of Dallas and the TWDB filed suits against the FWS, while some 20,000 Texans wrote letters in support of the refuge. Whatever the outcome of the suit (and right now it doesn’t look good for the plaintiffs), environmentalists have vowed to fight to protect the roughly 25,000 acres of forested wetlands.
It was not always this difficult to build dams and reservoirs. In the early and mid-twentieth century, reservoirs reigned supreme in the world of water management. In Texas, the heyday of the “big dam era” lasted from the thirties to the eighties. After that, the popularity of reservoirs began to wane, mostly for environmental reasons: They displace populations, destroy habitat and rivers, and negatively affect the condition and salinity of coastal estuaries. Plus they’re hard to build. Even if you can jump the political, environmental, and bureaucratic hurdles necessary to get one approved, it is likely to take fifteen to twenty years to actually finish one—nearly the same time horizon as for a new nuclear power plant. Of Texas’s 196 major reservoirs, 169 were built before 1980.
The responsibility for building Region C’s new reservoirs lies with the three giant utilities that control 75 percent of the area’s water: the Tarrant Regional Water District, the North Texas Municipal Water District, and Dallas Water Utilities. Tarrant and North Texas are wholesalers, selling water to cities; Dallas Water performs both wholesale and retail functions. Because there is little groundwater in the area, these governmental organizations with elected boards have by nature and tradition always been reservoir builders, securing their water by damming rivers in the Trinity River Basin. Dallas Water has five reservoirs, Tarrant Regional has four, and North Texas Municipal has three.
To a large extent, the future prosperity of Region C is in the hands of these agencies, and if you listen to the people who run them (and to the governor and a large number of elected state officials), new reservoirs are crucial to supplying the population’s future water needs. Water planners have proposed nineteen across the state. But the experiences with Nichols and Fastrill suggest that many—even most—may never see the light of day.
Reservoirs are just a part of the problem Dallas and Fort Worth will face in their attempt to pipe water from rural East Texas. Shumake is right—one of the most logical sources of supply in the area is the giant Toledo Bend Reservoir, in far East Texas, a little-used reservoir that was completed in 1969 by damming the Sabine River. It is the largest man-made body of water in the South and the fifth largest, by surface acres, in the United States. The river above it drains an area of 7,190 square miles. It is also, most importantly, the largest pool of water in the state that remains untapped by any large user, capable of producing an enormous two million acre-feet of water per year (Louisiana has rights to half of that). For this reason, Toledo Bend figures heavily in the water plan as a major source for all three of the big wholesalers.
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