When Hurricane Helene hit Florida on Sept. 26 and dumped up to 20 inches or more of rain in the Carolinas, the flooding that resulted contributed to the verified deaths of over 200 people, and large areas in several states are still struggling to recover. Meantime, here in Texas a friend of mine who owns a house about ten miles out of town has had his water well go dry, for only I think the second time since they've lived there for about twenty years. He's having to truck water in and is rigging up a gravity-feed tank to supply his showers and toilets.
This is the same friend who, when the possibility of a water shortage came up in conversation several years ago, said, "Hey, there's as much water as there ever was. It's just in different places than it used to be." That's certainly one way to look at it, but the way we collect and use water says a lot about our attitudes toward technology and nature in general.
In drier parts of the world, which includes most of central and west Texas, a good source of water is vital. Here in San Marcos, we have a spring-fed lake that archeologists say has been the site of more or less continual occupation by humans for the last nine thousand years. And the attraction of this particular spot was the continuous (or nearly continuous) supply of fresh water.
My friend has been talking to a man who drills water wells for a living, as his forebears have done for decades. He told my friend that there have been about eight times as many wells drilled in this region since 2020 as there were in the previous thirty years before. I can't verify that statistic right away, but it sounds right. Housing developments have sprung up in remote places that used to be ranches that had maybe a well at the house and another well under the stock-tank windmill, for several hundred or thousand acres. Now there are hundreds of houses on that same land, and each one needs several thousand gallons of water a year.
Many entire towns and cities here in Central Texas get their water from wells. The main source of well water in this region is the Edwards Aquifer, which Wikipedia calls "one of the most prolific artesian aquifers in the world." It is an underground reservoir in the porous "karst" limestone of this region, and stretches from near Austin in the east to near Del Rio on the Mexican border to the west. Water comes into the aquifer on land to the north and west, and exits through springs and wells along the southern edge. San Antonio has historically obtained most of its water from wells in the Edwards Aquifer, and consequently has one of the lowest water rates in the country.
Hydrology isn't exactly engineering, but there are clearly ethical issues in how much a particular natural resource is exploited. As more wells were drilled in the late twentieth century, there was concern that even the apparently infinite resource of the Edwards Aquifer could become depleted, so the Edwards Aquifer Authority was created. Like most such institutions, it has been criticized for being both too lax and too rigorous in protecting a natural resource upon which millions of people depend for life-giving water. I have a rancher friend who could be counted on to give a fifteen-minute harangue when prompted by a single question about how his battle with the aquifer regulators was going. And on the other side, there are Save Our Spring campaigns that try to stop new developments from drilling too many wells that will deplete the aquifer so much that the natural springs go dry, which has happened already on occasion.
The other side of the Texas water coin is flooding, and we have had plenty of that too. The weather patterns in this part of the state dictate that we sometimes get as much as half of our total annual rainfall in only one or two months, and one of those months is May. On Memorial Day 2015, a historic flood resulted when some thunderstorms decided to camp over the Hill Country centered around Wimberley, the town just west of San Marcos. The Blanco River through Wimberley, which is usually a little trickle barely wet enough to keep the moss green, became a raging torrent that night that swept away campers and people in riverside houses, and even took out a vehicular bridge. At least twelve people died in the flood and some bodies were never recovered. My financial adviser, who lives in Wimberley, recalled to us a few months later how he waded out in waist-deep water to help in a rescue effort that night.
While we can still have severe flooding, the efforts of engineers and planners over the decades have done a lot to tame the flash-flood potential of Texas streams and rivers. Just west of San Marcos is an earthen dam that's maybe sixty feet high and almost a quarter-mile long. Most of the time it looks just silly, because there's no water behind it. But during the same 2015 Memorial Day rainfall, the flood-control system built in the 1980s with Federal money, of which the dry dam is one part, channeled floodwaters into a spillway that, while impressing people with its size and rapidity of flow, did relatively little damage except to a neighborhood near the San Marcos River. A similar flood in 1970, before the flood-control system was built, managed to inundate a good part of San Marcos, including the Aquarena Springs amusement park, whose collection of alligators got loose and led to some interesting situations afterwards.
My father had a saying about women that seems to apply also to water in Texas: "You can't live with 'em, but you can't live without 'em." When you're about to be flooded out of your home, you may just have recently had to be trucking water in because your well went dry. Texas always has been a region of extremes, and our relationship to water bears that out.
Sources: Besides the Wikipedia article "Edwards Aquifer," I referred to a Texas Monthly article on the Memorial Day 2015 floods at https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/the-central-texas-memorial-day-flood-2015-is-one-for-the-history-books/, and a report written by Jack Ray D'Ottavio for the Texas State University Geography Department at https://digital.library.txst.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/0365fd1a-94f3-4dd2-a825-c844ab27d456/content. My blog describing some of the consequences of the 1970 flood can be read at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-day-submarine-theater-flipped-over.html.
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