Texas Water Supplier Approves Emergency Drought Plan
At a board meeting on Wednesday, the Lower Colorado River Authority approved an emergency plan that could cut off water supplies to downriver rice farmers entirely next year if the drought worsens.
The plan, which still needs to be approved by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, means that rice farmers — who require a huge amount of water for irrigation and have always gotten enough for two crops a year — may be lucky if they get enough water for one crop, let alone their usual two.
The amount of water in Lake Buchanan and Lake Travis, the two reservoirs used ...
Comments (8)
Suzanne Hardie Lander via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Can they plant something less water intensive?
Chris Thornton via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Guess we can import rice from China like we do everything else.
mary westemeier
"We'd damn well better build these reservoirs...." With what money? The $9 Billion Perry "Rainey Day Fund" that couldn't even be used as "Firey Day Fund"? Get real....Texans are just NOW finding out the real screw job that has been happening to them the past 10 years. Want a reservoir? You have to ask the FEDS....that's how Perry expects ALL Texas problems to be solved.
Mickey Meader via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Wht doesn't Texas build a few DESALINATION Plants and have all the water they want?
Sherman Green Harrison via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Dry-land rice farmers need to think about what they're doing.
Sebastian St.Troy
It seems that the LCRA Board continue to get things wrong when making decisions about water use. Farmers should be allowed water before car washes, landscaping, and other high water use businesses. The farmers should be allowed water! The LCRA Board needs to understand that food production is essential to a good economy.
Beverly Kimbrough
My understanding is the the federal government buys the rice produced by the farms on the Colorado as surplus commodities. If this is correct, why not just pay the farmers the same money to NOT grow the rice, and save the water in Lake Travis.
Truque Shugar
Wow.. let's think about this... some people say the government is to blame because we need to build more reservoirs... while others say that the rice farmers need to plant something else and still others say we need to build desalinization plants... New resevoirs will not help.... Why??? Because there is no rain even fill up the reservoirs we have... so build a new reservoir and it will be empty. Think about it folks... if we were to pump 100 MILLION gallons of water per day into Lake Buchanan and Lake Travis it would take 2,514 days to fill them up to a conservation level... and that is if there was no evaporation and the municipalities did not use it for drinking water. We are in a drought. Pointing fingers and blaming farmers and polititions will not help. Building desal plants and placing pipelines from underground aquifers coupled with effluent water treatment and usage will solve the problems.