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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But actually getting hold of its water will not be easy. First, there’s the fact that the only way to transport water from Toledo Bend to the Metroplex is via a two-hundred-plus-mile, mostly uphill pipeline. Estimated cost: $1.1 billion. Estimated time to secure all the environmental permits and interbasin transfer rights: maybe twenty years. Aside from that, there are the possible environmental protections. Though nothing quite so violent as a new reservoir is being constructed, taking large amounts of water away from a river’s ecology has profound effects over the long term. The Sabine River Basin is a complex ecosystem that includes habitat for all sorts of animals. Precious cypress-tupelo swamps flourish near the river’s mouth. A large drop in river flow means higher salinity in the Gulf, coastal wetlands, and other sensitive areas. All this will provide the opposition with considerable ammunition, especially considering the 2007 water bill’s directive to the Legislature to establish minimum environmental flows.
“Everything becomes a trade-off,” says Kelly Brumbelow, a professor of civil engineering at Texas A&M University and a leading authority on water management. “You can move that water around, but only if you are willing to accept significant ecological impacts. Only if you are willing to take all of these estuaries and riverine ecosystems in East Texas and sacrifice them.” For decades, a willingness to make those trade-offs has paved the way for new dams and reservoirs. But Brumbelow says this is changing. “The students I see around here,” he explains, “the ones who are going to be making the decisions twenty or twenty-five years from now, they’re much more comfortable with the idea of environmental protection.”
The most obvious solution to the water problem is to use less water. This notion is both crushingly obvious and completely ignored by the average Texas water hog, who blithely takes thirty-minute showers, fills and refills his backyard pool, and runs the sprinkler for two hours a day, four days a week. Except in times of extreme drought, conservation, especially in big cities, is just not high on anyone’s agenda. This may be partly because, in Region C at least, municipal governments and utilities have never tried to make the case that it should be.
As a commodity, water is valueless. The utilities are granted free permits for it by the state. They do not pay for the water. What we pay them is based only on what it costs them to store it, haul it from the reservoir, and pay the salaries of their employees. Though a number of private landowners are starting to actually sell their groundwater to cities like San Antonio and El Paso, the overwhelming majority of the state’s water has no commodity value, as does, say, a barrel of oil. Because of this, business and industry have never been compelled to view it as anything particularly precious. Water in Texas is an economic paradox: It is rare, yes, but it is also dirt cheap, something nobody has ever cared much about saving.
The key measure of water consumption is gallons per capita per day. According to the TWDB’s most recent data, Richardson is the biggest user among Texas cities, at 275 gallons. Dallas isn’t far behind at 238. Plano is at 225. By contrast, Austin uses only 177 gallons per person per day, and San Antonio 142. Though the numbers are almost certainly skewed against the Metroplex because of the presence of so much industry, the area has done so little to promote conservation that it remains vulnerable to criticisms such as Shumake’s that it is draining the rivers, lakes, and wetlands of East Texas merely to water its lawns.
What complicates water conservation is that the big water wholesalers, like Tarrant Regional and North Texas Municipal, are not in a position to enforce it. (Dallas Water, within the city limits, is an exception.) Only the buyers of their water, the municipalities, can set watering rules or other consumption limits. The result is a hodgepodge of unorganized, unorchestrated conservation practices that vary widely from city to city. The state, of course, could take control of the matter and mandate strict conservation, but don’t hold your breath. It is extremely difficult to try and set consumption limits in a state where rainfall ranges from 55 inches per year, in Beaumont, to 10 inches a year, in El Paso. People in Port Arthur do not usually need to water their lawns; in Midland, lawns and gardens wither quickly without frequent irrigation.
Perhaps more important, there are the obstacles of culture and tradition. Most Americans bristle at the suggestion that limits be placed on their personal freedoms. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have come to include luxuriant showers, daily dishwasher cycles, and backyard hot tubs and pools. What’s more, for many Texans, especially those in fast-growing suburbs, lawns and gardens are regarded as an inalienable right. The look and feel, not to mention the dollar value, of homes in booming, affluent communities like Southlake and Frisco is based on St. Augustine grass and decorative shrubs. This is real money, and people will not want to give it up, no matter how much they are harangued about the moral righteousness and environmental correctness of Xeriscaping with ornamental cacti.
That is not to say that anyone is giving up. Water awareness campaigns are in their infancy in most of the state. And San Antonio—now the water planner’s poster child for smart conservation—has had enormous success in curtailing consumption. The city offers all sorts of carrot-and-stick incentives to save water: up to $525 in rebates for replanting your yard with low-water plants, a $100 washing machine rebate to replace your old water hog, free water-efficient toilets. New laws were also passed in 2005 and 2007 that require drought-tolerant grass for all new homes and businesses and rain sensors for lawn irrigation systems; prohibit charity car washes, except in existing commercial facilities; and require annual checkups for any watering system covering more than five acres. The city is now aggressively seeking out and working with golf courses and other mega-consumers to develop plans to save water. The result is a per capita consumption rate so admirably low that San Antonio has become the benchmark for conservation around the state.
But while individual consumers and businesses get most of the blame for poor conservation, one of the worst water wasters of all is neither a person nor a company. It is the system itself. Leaks. Much of the infrastructure that carries our water was built during the big-dam era and is now forty to fifty years old and badly deteriorated. In Fort Worth, a 2005 water audit showed that 7.2 billion gallons of water were lost to leakage—a thumping 16.7 percent of all the water used in the city that year.
“This is one of the dirty little secrets of urban water utilities,” says Brumbelow, the A&M professor. “There are lots of older utilities out there that are not doing a good job of keeping up their infrastructure. We’ve seen losses as high as forty percent.” (An extreme example of this elsewhere in the state is the Rio Grande Valley, where old, unlined dirt canals are used to get the water out to the fields, allowing literally millions of gallons to seep away into the ground.) The problem is bad enough that the TWDB now requires all retail public water suppliers to do water audits every five years. But knowing you have a leak and fixing it are not the same thing. As with so many other examples of sagging American infrastructure, no one wants to spend the billions of dollars it will cost to replace all the pipes, valves, pumps, and other hardware.
The final form of conservation in the state water plan goes by the innocuous-sounding name of “reuse.” It’s a wonderful concept, in all its forms. It means, quite simply, that water we have already used we will use again. Let’s take the most ordinary example. You flush your toilet, sending three and a half gallons of water and waste down the drain. The sewage system ferries your deposit to a wastewater treatment plant, where it is run through a series of filters. Sixty percent of the water in that plant ends up back in your local river. (It may dismay you to learn that in many rivers, particularly the ones downstream of a major city, much of the water you see is treated effluent. It’s fairly clean, though, often cleaner than the “wild” river water it is dumped back into.)
Once the effluent has been returned to the local rivers, it can be used to water golf courses, fill cooling towers at power plants, or in other applications that do not involve consumption. Theoretically, it can also be put directly into a reservoir to be consumed, presumably by you. Because of the gross-out factor inherent in such a process, this does not currently happen (nor is it envisioned in the 2007 water plan). However, in the most sophisticated and ingenious use, the river-borne effluent is pumped into a reservoir to be consumed, but not before being filtered by an artificially constructed wetland.
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