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I just moved to Austin, TX 1.5 years ago. We've got our own severe drought here, and I wonder what's going to happen in the long term. Was it a mistake to move
by CWuestefeld 12y ago
I just moved to Austin, TX 1.5 years ago. We've got our own severe drought here, and I wonder what's going to happen in the long term. Was it a mistake to move here?
At least in TX, there are a couple of ways in which it's clear we're doing it to ourselves.
First, we can't keep the reservoirs full because a significant amount of water flow is earmarked for rice farmers down at the mouth of the river. That's right: rice farmers. It's clearly not a good idea to be supporting a water-intensive crop in this geography.
Second, Texas has a "right of capture" in its laws. That basically means that whatever water you can capture, you can have. There's a controversy near my town where a private company wants to drill well into the deep aquifer to pump and sell huge amounts of water, such that local homeowners are afraid their less-deep wells will run dry. And there's little one can do to insulate oneself: there's no way to stake claim to the part of the aquifer under your house, other than to be the first person to pump it all out.
I wonder how much of this stupidity is also driving CA's problems.
- lsb 12y agohttp://calrice.org http://calrice.org
- BryantD 12y agoAlmonds are a very water-intensive crop. We grow a huge amount of almonds here in California. (Most of them are exported.) See http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30052290 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30052290 for one writeup. Now, they're also a very lucrative crop, so not growing almonds would certainly affect the state's economy. But...
- bashinator 12y agoSpecifically, one almond takes about one gallon of water to produce.
- jaryd 12y agoHate to be that guy but do you have a source for this? That's pretty incredible and I'd want to read more. nevermind: the parent article pretty much covers it
- bashinator 12y agoSure, here's some mainstream reporting of it http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-californias-water-going http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-califo... And here's the original research. http://www.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Report47-WaterFootprintCrops-Vol1.pdf http://www.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Report47-WaterFootprin...
- jaryd 12y agoWow--thanks! The "How Thirsty Is Your Food" infographic from the first link is really incredible. Definitely makes me think differently about eating handfuls of almonds, or a huge amount of broc with dinner.
- CWuestefeld 12y agoI agree that's really interesting. But it would be better to normalize to serving size. It doesn't seem fair to compare one almond or one grape to a whole head of broccoli.
- kaybe 12y agoWater use is often seen as something negative. When the crops come from a wet place anyway, it shouldn't be a problem I think.
- sosuke 12y agoThe droughts in Austin, and Texas, are far longer running than 1.5 years. Welcome to Austin, water shouldn't be a reason you think it is a mistake to live here. There is a City of Austin Drought Contingency Plan: http://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Water/Conservation/Planning_and_Policy/Drought_Contingency_Plan_8-16-2012.pdf http://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Water/C... Not Austin, but you can read an article on central Texas rainfall patterns done in Mason county on a ranch from 1950-2012 http://doublehelixranch.com/FlyGapRainTrends.html http://doublehelixranch.com/FlyGapRainTrends.html Read about the "Record Drought" when the rain stopped in 1947 http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/current-drought-pales-in-comparison-with-1950s-d-1/nRdC5/ http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/current-drought-pal... I hear the elder in south Texas talk about how everything was green and they had various fruit trees when they were younger, all that is down there now is dust and mesquite. Edit: The Lower Colorado River Authority has a Drought Update as of March 2015 http://www.lcra.org/water/water-supply/drought-update/Documents/Highland-Lakes-Combined-Storage-Gauge-030615.pdf http://www.lcra.org/water/water-supply/drought-update/Docume...
- CWuestefeld 12y agoA couple of other things that concern me here: It appears that the authorities are sacrificing Lake Travis in order to keep the city lake full and beautiful. IMHO, it would be better to let the level fall there as well, to keep people thinking about the need to conserve. I live just a few minutes from Jacob's Well [1]. Having heard stories of how this spring used to sometimes shoot 20 feet into the air, but in some recent events has stopped flowing altogether, makes concern about draining of the aquifers (not just surface water) seem quite real. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob%27s_Well_%28Texas%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob%27s_Well_%28Texas%29 edit - spelling
- sosuke 12y agoI would love for the city to reflect our water problems in town lake, lake travis is being sacrificed. They won't go for that though, not with all the downtown development.
- valgaze 12y agoThat's interesting you mention rice farmers in TX because in Sacramento rice farmers are getting paid to sell not rice but water to Los Angeles. Evidently many of these folks will probably end up making more $$ selling water than rice See: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article13908632.html http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drough...
- kyrra 12y agoThe 2011 drought destroyed the Austin water reserves. Check the lake level in 2010/2011 vs where we are today[0]. For those that don't know, in 2011 we had record temperatures and little water which led to a few wild fires. The Bastrop wildfire [1] burned 34,000 acres of land destroying 1650 homes. There was also a smaller fire (160 acres) in west Austin in the Steiner Ranch development destroying 25 homes. Temperature wise, Austin had 90 days with temperatures >= 100 degrees that summer. The area hasn't recouped its loss in water from that drought yet, and it will likely take a very long time for that to happen. Also, the Lower Colorado River Authority is the one that dictates where the water ends up, so they try to balance it for everyone that uses this supply (which is why Lake Travis is still so low). For fun, Lake Travis had a island that would appear in the middle sometimes depending on water levels, called "Sometimes Island". Since the drought, it's been jokingly renamed "Sometimes Peninsula"[2]. [0] http://travis.uslakes.info/Level.asp http://travis.uslakes.info/Level.asp [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastrop_County_Complex_fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastrop_County_Complex_fire [2] http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/no-boat-needed-to-get-to-sometimes-island/nRhBY/ http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/no-boat-needed-to-g...
- pnut 12y agoNot related to water per se, but I've lived in Austin for over 6 years now, and can confidently say it was a mistake to move here for me. Where do you go when you want to get out of town? Big Bend? New Orleans? Sure, 8 hours later... And beyond that, what? So much cultural desolation, for hundreds of miles. May as well be in a moon colony. Texas, where dreams go to die. Of course, these are my personal feelings, so downvote away. If you moved here because it's cheap, like most people do, like I did from the Bay area, you'll find a cheap existence, as in, you get what you pay for.
- driverdan 12y agoIt seems you've forgotten we have an airport.
- kyrra 12y ago3 other large cities within a 3 hour drive (Dallas, Houston, San Antonio). The Gulf coast is also around 3 hours away. Not close, but it's something.
- perturbation 12y agoDallas and Houston are a bit of a hike (4 and 3 hours, respectively), but San Antonio is only an hour away. I find that there's plenty of stuff to do in Austin itself anyway. (Heck, SXSW is going on right now.) I have a theory that a lot of people move to Austin expecting it to be somehow hermetically sealed away from Texas; if you don't like Texas, you will eventually not like Austin. What do you like about the Bay area that you miss in Austin?
- jseliger 12y agoWas it a mistake to move here? People are moving to the South in general because housing is cheap there—as Matt Yglesias discusses in The Rent is Too Damn High: http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0... : There is another option besides denser cities or more sprawling ones: People can just relocate to other cities altogether. And increasingly, that’s what Americans have been doing. If the only way to afford a place in a safe neighborhood in some metropolitan areas is to bear the enormous costs of long commutes, those are just cities with little if any housing that’s truly affordable. The natural choice is to go to the cities that aren’t choked with these problems. As Forbes magazine put it, “It’s no secret that the Southeast and Western United States are booming. The costs of living and doing business there are often cheaper than in big coastal cities.” People have to go somewhere, and by and large they’re going where it’s cheap. That’s why between 2000 and 2010 the Dallas and Houston metropolitan areas each added about 1.2 million people, dwarfing the approximately 500,000 each added by the much bigger New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago metro areas. But this kind of boom driven by a low cost of living is a particular kind of boom. The relatively sluggish population growth in New York City and its suburbs during this period wasn’t a repeat of the urban collapse of the 1970s. The financial services sector at the core of the region’s economy was, for all the (oft-deserved) opprobrium it’s attracted over the past several years, one of the decade’s major money-making success stories. The city’s specialization as the main headquarters of American journalism and publishing seemed relatively unaffected by the sweeping technological change reshaping media. The crime drop of the 1990s that turned the city’s momentum around in the first place continued. A wave of gentrification swept through the Lower East Side, vast swathes of Brooklyn, important parts of Queens, and even Hoboken and Jersey City across the Hudson River. But while this kind of gentrification demonstrates the continuing appeal of the Big Apple, it represents only a small net increase in the population. The people moving in are largely replacing other people who are moving out as rents go up. Some of this is due to working-class families moving out of now-expensive neighborhoods. Other times, it is the cycling of twentysomething professionals out of the city as they start families and want more space. In both cases, the city can prosper without its population increasing very much. By contrast, the “booming” cities of the Southeast and the western United States aren’t necessarily booming in the sense of getting rich. The ten metropolitan areas with the fastest population growth between the 2000 and 2010 censuses were, in order, Palm Coast, Florida; St. George, Utah; Las Vegas, Nevada; Raleigh, North Carolina; Cape Coral, Florida; Provo, Utah; Greeley, Colorado; Austin, Texas; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; and Bend, Oregon. That geographical distribution supports the idea of a boom in the Southeast and West. But it’s striking that in 2009 all ten of these metro areas had per capita personal incomes below the national average of $40,757. Indeed, only Cape Coral was even close. It may be a long-term mistake, but the localities that control building height, parking minimums, and so forth have ensured that people move to the desert states.