Texas state climatologist John Nielson-Gammon tells The Lookout that he fears the drought--which has already cost more than $5 billion in damage--may be similar to the one that struck the state in the 1950s. The weather patterns at the source of this drought are likely to continue, Nielson-Gammon said--namely the "La Niña" weather pattern in the Pacific. The drought cycle began in earnest in 2005--though 2007 and 2010 were wet years--and may stick around until 2020. Ninety-five percent of the state is experiencing severe or exceptional drought.
"Many residents remember the drought of the 1950s, and tree ring records show that drought conditions occasionally last for a decade or even longer. I'm concerned because the same ocean conditions that seem to have contributed to the 1950s drought have been back for several years now and may last another five to 15 years," he said in a statement. The 1950s drought, which lasted seven years, reshaped Texas by spurring a movement away from rural areas and into cities. The state also formed a network of artificial lakes that are still around today.
It's still unclear what the long-term impact of this drought will be. The past year has been the driest year on record in the state, while the past summer was also the hottest on record, according to the National Weather Service. More than 125,000 acres burned in wildfires. Half of the state's cotton crop has been destroyed, even long-time ranchers are selling off their cattle en masse, and millions of trees are withered and dying. The touristy area of Lake Conroe, near Houston, is quickly drying up as well. In April, Gov. Rick Perry asked Texans to pray for rain in an official proclamation, but those prayers have gone unanswered.
Federal aid will offset most of the drought's damage so far--approximately $5.2 billion in agricultural losses and $250 million in wildfire devastation, reports The Christian Science Monitor. But the drought may cause more long-term damage, according to Hillary Hylton at Time. The price of cotton products is likely to go up soon, while beef prices might go down for a while before rising dramatically in two years or so. That's because Texas farmers who are selling off their cattle now will glut the market, but in a few years there will be fewer cows breeding.
A Small Town, Almost Waterless, Takes a Big Gamble
Keith Tilley, the town's director of public works at a quarry being considered as a water source. Groesbeck's sole water source is now 44 inches below its normal level.
By SUSANNAH JACOB November 12, 2011
GROESBECK — On her way to work recently, Jackie Levingston, the volunteer mayor of this ranching town east of Waco, stopped at an office in City Hall to pay her water bill. “Before there’s no water left to buy,” she said, making a sad joke.
Groesbeck, which has received no measurable rainfall since April, ranks near the top of the state’s list of communities in danger of running out of water. The most intense drought in Texas history has caused the water against the dam dividing the Navasota River, Groesbeck’s sole source of water, to fall 44 inches below its normal level.
Local leaders are attempting a quick fix, lest the town, whose population is 4,328, run out of water by Thanksgiving, something Ms. Levingston recently warned was possible. The local paper, The Groesbeck Journal, ends virtually every water-related article with the admonition “Continue to pray for rain!”
Other cities in Limestone County do not face as dire a situation as Groesbeck, the county seat, because they rely on different sources of water, like groundwater wells. But 18 communities across Texas, including the Austin suburbs Leander and Cedar Park as well as Groesbeck, are on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s “high priority” water list, which covers cities and towns that may either run out of water within 180 days if nothing changes (like rainfall or a new pipeline connection) or do not know how much water they have remaining
In Groesbeck, some residents are grumbling that town leaders could be managing better. “If we’re running out of water, how come the carwashes are still running?” said Mary Johnson of Mary’s Breakfast and Burger Barn, a breakfast and lunch spot known for its buttermilk pie.
Groesbeck put watering restrictions in effect in August and banned all outdoor watering, starting in September. Local officials said the water had evaporated more quickly than expected in the summer heat.
A solution of sorts to keep the taps running may be at hand, although it is not guaranteed and it could be expensive. On Oct. 27, Groesbeck signed an agreement with Lehigh Hanson Inc., a construction materials company that the city has had legal disputes with over other issues in the past, to buy water from the company’s quarry. The quarry was a favorite summertime hangout of teenagers, but city officials recently removed a diving board and erected barriers around the site to discourage their return. It is full of still, clear water that has already been tested for quality, according to Martha Stanton, Groesbeck’s city administrator.
The plan is for the quarry water, which Groesbeck began pumping on Wednesday, to flow three miles down nearly dry riverbeds to Fort Parker Lake, which is also dry and near the water treatment plant. But whether this will work is unknown. Earlier this month, as she gazed at the lake’s unsightly lake bed, cracked and oozing, Ms. Stanton said to Keith Tilley, her son and Groesbeck’s public works director: “I didn’t know it was this bad. I don’t know if our plan is going to work.”
If the dry riverbeds absorb the water, the town, with its per-capita income of just over $10,500, may need to build a far more expensive pipeline to the quarry.
For the residents, the stakes are high. Ms. Levingston fought back tears as she testified about Groesbeck’s plight to state lawmakers in Austin two weeks ago.
“Gentlemen,” she told them, “there will never be anybody coming to Groesbeck if there is no water. And the people that are there are not going to stay.”
When drought caused the water to recede, a car containing a woman's body was found in a lake on the property of Jack Mewbourn, right. Mr. Mewbourn's grandson Arron, left, found the car and Pat Jordan, Van Zandt County Constable, responded to the call.
By MANNY FERNANDEZ November 29, 2011
MARTINS MILL, Tex. — For more than three years, the lake on Jack Mewbourn’s ranch here held a secret at its murky bottom: A 1999 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. His grandson was the first one to notice the top of the car peeking out of the water. It wasn’t luck, or even fate. It was drought.
The water level in the seven-acre lake has dropped about five feet from a lack of rain. Stand on the grass lining the lake’s edge today, and in any other year you would be standing nearly waist-deep in water.
On a recent Saturday, Mr. Mewbourn, a longtime rancher in this rural unincorporated community about 90 minutes southeast of Dallas, took a boat to the middle of the lake with two of his grandsons. They confirmed that the small object they thought at first might be a barrel was indeed a car. Mr. Mewbourn called a local constable, and with the help of a diver and a tow truck, the vehicle was slowly dragged out. Inside, still buckled into the driver’s seat, were the remains of Brenda Kay Oliver, who had been missing since July 2008.
Ms. Oliver’s relatives said she had never recovered from the trauma of her 19-year-old son’s suicide. He had drowned himself in a nearby lake. The authorities believe Ms. Oliver, 55, took her own life by driving her car into Mr. Mewbourn’s lake, about a mile from where her sister, the last person to see her alive, had been living at the time.
Mr. Mewbourn and the Van Zandt County constable, Pat Jordan, have found themselves in recent days calling a cruel thing like a drought a strange sort of blessing. “If it wouldn’t have been for the drought,” Mr. Jordan said, “she’d probably still be in the car in that lake.”
The historic drought that has devastated crops and forced millions of Texans in small towns and large cities to abide by mandatory water restrictions has had at least one benefit: As lake levels have dropped around the state, objects of all kinds that had been submerged for years, decades and even centuries are being revealed. Some of the discovered items are common debris like computer monitors, tires and sunken boats. But much of it has attracted the attention of historians, anthropologists, criminal investigators and, in one case, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Long-submerged marble tombstones from the 1880s have become visible in the receding waters of Lake Buchanan in Central Texas. Near the Texas-Louisiana border, the grave sites from an early 19th-century cemetery have turned up at one drought-stricken lake. Pat Mercado-Allinger, the director of the Texas Historical Commission’s archaeology division, said one water authority estimated having roughly 200 previously unreported archaeological sites resulting from lowered lake levels.
“The drought in Texas has been so severe and so widespread, across essentially the entire state, that we’re hearing reports from all over,” said Ms. Mercado-Allinger, who was reluctant to discuss precise locations of many sites because of concerns for looting. “There are artifact collectors out there and looters who look for opportunities and go add to their personal collections or mine the sites. We have to be very careful.”
At Lake Georgetown north of Austin, where the water level has dropped 23 feet, fishermen found a human skull at the edge of the water last month. The Georgetown police initially thought it might be related to the 2002 disappearance of a 19-year-old woman, but the skull was ultimately found to be of historical, not criminal, significance. It is believed to be the skull of a Native American man that is hundreds or thousands of years old, and is being studied in a lab by anthropologists at Texas State University in San Marcos.
In East Texas at Lake Nacogdoches, which has dropped 12 feet in the drought, residents stumbled onto a much larger object in late July. It was a spherical aluminum tank, four feet in diameter, that was cracked on top and sat in the mud at the lake’s edge. NASA officials later determined that it was a piece of debris from the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry in 2003, killing the seven astronauts aboard.
The debris, one of 18 cryogenic tanks used to store the oxygen and hydrogen that provided electrical power to the shuttle, was put on a truck and driven to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Only one of the 18 tanks remains missing, a NASA spokeswoman said.
At Richland-Chambers Reservoir in north-central Texas, which has decreased more than eight feet, a post-Civil-War-era cemetery of freed slaves has emerged along the shoreline. The wooden coffins and the remains of more than 20 African-Americans, most of them children, have been found. A skull was first discovered in 2009 after the lake level dropped, but when the waters rose again, the site was submerged, forcing local amateur historians to wait.
“Everybody hates the drought, but I needed the drought,” said Bruce F. McManus, chairman of the Navarro County Historical Commission. “I knew it was there.”
Despite periodic rainstorms, lower temperatures and even snowfall in Amarillo late last month, Texas remains in the midst of one of its worst droughts.
From January through October, statewide rainfall totaled 10.77 inches, about 15 inches below average. The 12-month period from October 2010 through September 2011 were the driest 12 months in Texas since at least 1895, when statewide weather records begin, breaking the previous record low set in 1956 by 2.5 inches. “It’s the most severe single-year drought on record,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “There literally is no point of comparison.”
Professor Nielsen-Gammon said that the drought would persist and that most of the state would be experiencing major drought through next summer. “We have so much rainfall to make up, it’s unlikely to be made up in the spring and summer,” he said.
The water levels at many of the state’s man-made lakes have become a drought barometer. Lake levels have decreased statewide by as little as a few feet to as much as 50 feet or more. Some lakes are completely dry, and others are close to it. Lake E. V. Spence in West Texas, which normally has a maximum depth of 108 feet, is less than 1 percent full.
In Canton in East Texas, the drought has hurt Donna McWilliams as it has other Texans — she and her husband lost trees and sold off cattle because of a lack of hay — but it also helped her. She is the sister of Ms. Oliver, whose body was found in Martins Mill.
Ms. Oliver’s relatives had mailed fliers with her picture to homeless shelters and clinics, and put them up in local restaurants and pharmacies, always hoping, always wondering.
“I guess ‘closure’ is the word,” said Ms. McWilliams, 60, one of Ms. Oliver’s two sisters. “Now we don’t have to wonder anymore. I do think the drought is a negative, but if there’s anything that can happen good out of a drought, it’s this, and it’s a blessing.”
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