Texas Drought Sparks Water Well Drilling Frenzy
In the Central Texas town of Spicewood, near the much-diminished Lake Travis, a Bee Cave Drilling crew used a 35-ton, 40-foot-tall drilling rig to create a hole 350-feet deep in the yard of a home.
After the hole was drilled, workers put a casing down it and sealed the area with cement, creating a water well that would allow the homeowners to collect groundwater and avoid relying on the public water system for irrigation.
As the most intense drought in state history drags on, plenty of Texans are waiting for months to have such wells drilled, fearful that their municipalities ...
Comments (8)
JC DemocratofTejas
T. Boone Pickens, oil man of Texas, owns more water rights than any other person/entity. Hmmmmm!
Kathi Thomas via Texas Tribune on Facebook
People who got wells so they could water landscapes & escape water restrictions should be ashamed of themselves.:(
Dave Mundy via Texas Tribune on Facebook
You may want to review the Palmer Drought Index
BiffTannen
Great job! You'll drain the lakes and the aquifers!
Glen Hill
The water tables are definitely going down. Folks are selling the water out from under us across the State.
Cris Sleightholm
What an "all about me" society people have become. By all means, my yard is gonna stay green.
Mickey TheMouse via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Kathi - you mean like the city of Wimberley? Wimberley has planted 18-wheeler truckloads of St Augustine grass and irrigated it during a period of exceptional drought. They used over 700,000 gallons to irrigate 1/4 acre over 5 months. Now they want to get a permit for a well so that they won't have to pay for the water thrown on the ground. During the same period, the city has adopted ordinances prohibiting property owners from installing or filling pools - yet the city itself will not be observing any of the restrictions it seeks to impose on residents and even people outside its jurisdiction.
Mike Murphy
This story omits another option folks definitely should consider: rainwater collection. In the mid 1990s, my wife and I saw all the new homes going up along Hamilton Pool Road across from our family ranch; all of them preceded by a water well drilling rig. Consequently, we decided to give rainwater a try. Our system, with 30K gallons of capacity, enough to supposedly get our family of 4 through a repeat of the 1950s drought, came online in April 1996, during a drought. We filled the tanks with well water to the halfway mark, which got us to August when that little drought broke.
The rainwater was heaven compared to well water, which contained about 110 grains hardness, and was mineral laden. We've been living on nothing but rainwater since then, until last year. Thanks to a plumbing mishap involving a frozen then thawed pipe last Feb., we lost about 10K of stored rainwater. Consequently, we wound up buying about 8K of water over last spring/summer, thanks to what tree ring scientists say is the driest 12-month period in TX since 1789. (We still had well water, but my wife said no more well water in the rainwater tanks!)
Thankfully, we caught 3.75" of rain in December, bringing our total for 2011 to 13.09". Since then, we've caught 4.59", including 1.62" from the rain event the past few days. As a result, our tanks are completely full for the first time since Sep. 2010.
Cost for our system in 1996 was about $20K, biggest expense were the storage tanks, 3 x 10K at $3500 each, and a 2200 gallon catch tank at $1400. For the cost of the cheap well quoted in the story, you can put in a modest RW system; the high end well cost should cover a SOTA RW system.
Rainwater still has some issues, though. The TCEQ has not come to grips with it as a business concern, their solution for small businesses wishing to supply rainwater for drinking remains to chlorinate it, which in the view of us RW users screws up perfectly drinkable rainwater. Time will tell whether the rules get changed, and whether developers will hit upon RW collection as a viable means to provide water to a commercial development. For us individuals, though, I'm thoroughly convinced it's not just viable, but the desired way to go.