Barton Creek, one of Texas’ urban creeks pristine enough to swim in, snakes westward into the Hill Country. For the last four summers, the creek south of Sculpture Falls hasn’t seen water. The banks are thick with native plants, claiming more of the riverbed for their territory. In the middle of the karst limestone creekbed, where water once flowed, someone has left an upholstered leather armchair. The seat is worn.
Barton Creek sits on top of the Edwards Aquifer, which is in Stage III critical drought as of July 29. The Lovelady well on South First, which scientists have used to measure Austin’s groundwater levels for over 75 years, still barely hovers above Stage IV exceptional drought. Even after some of the most rainfall Texas has ever seen, drought persists.
There’s a group on Facebook called “DOES THE GREENBELT HAVE WATER” where Austinites post photos of popular Barton Creek greenbelt swimming spots. The answer to the question is usually no. The page’s cover photo is an old one from when the creek was full, with the song “I Will Remember You” by Sarah McLachlan pasted on top.
On the weekend of the devastating Independence Day floods, Austinites took out their phones to videotape the floodwaters, full of trees and debris, rushing into Barton Creek, and posted them to the Facebook group. The videos were so shocking because the creekbed was dry, bone-dry, most of Barton Creek just a pit of chalky stones, until the gray-brown water surged in. In one such video, it tumbled over the rocky cascade at Twin Falls, the onlookers stepping backward faster and faster as the water spilled over.
In the week that followed, some excitedly posted photos of Barton Creek to the group, temporarily full of water at Sculpture Falls and the Hill of Life, flowing under the MoPac bridge. Others admonished them, when that rainfall had taken so very much.
The flooding in Central Texas creeks and rivers took at least 135 lives over the course of a few days, as the numbers of those missing dwindled with the passing weeks. Most casualties were in Kerr County, where the Guadalupe River swelled 26 feet in less than an hour. The soil across the Hill Country became thoroughly saturated with rainfall, overflowing into creeks, rivers, and lakes. When it kept raining after July 4, that soil saturation increased risks of flooding for several more days.
But just weeks earlier, in May, 58% of the state was in dark-red drought conditions. Historic rain came out of nowhere. Several leading climate experts spoke to the Chronicle about drought conditions in mid-June, predicting they would only worsen going into July and August. The rainy season was supposed to end with the last days of June, and it had been a dry June. Only a major rain event would break the drought pattern that we’ve been experiencing since around 2021, and that didn’t seem likely for the rest of the summer.
July is usually the second-driest month of the year in Texas. The month typically brings less than 2 inches of rain. This July was the wettest ever on record, with 5 to 10 inches falling within Austin city limits and, shockingly, up to 24 inches in Lago Vista and greater Lake Travis area.
That sudden rainfall was cataclysmic. For longtime Texans who have weathered multiple years-long droughts, the promise of a recharged water supply may be appealing. And the rains did have an effect on the state’s drought – that 58% figure has plummeted to 21% of the state still remaining in drought conditions, the stubborn pockets over Medina County and far West Texas.
But, hydrologists have emphasized to the Chronicle, ever-stronger storms are not good for drought, as some might assume. For the moment, July’s rains have swelled Texas’ lakes and rivers, but they didn’t do much for the underground aquifers we heavily rely on.
The issue, hydrologists said, is that climate change is isolating the multiple, slow, soaking rain events into fewer, stronger, and more violent storms in Texas.
When the soil becomes overwhelmed with water all at once, the overflow cannot make it down into the aquifers. Much of Texas gets its drinking water from aquifers, made of loam and clay and sand. Water can take years, decades, or even centuries to seep through those layers from the surface down into the underground lake, a recharge that needs slowly soaking rain.
“The preferred way to cure a drought is steady precipitation that moistens soils, fills reservoirs, and recharges aquifers slowly, without flooding. That’s not what happened in Central Texas recently,” wrote the Texas Water Development Board in their July 14 drought update.
And as rain events become more dramatic but less frequent, the state is also getting hotter every year, as experts track climbing average temperature across Texas. Texas is hotter today than during the Dust Bowl era and the 1950s drought of record. That heat and soil evaporation also make drought worse.
The reality of climate change in Texas is a two-headed beast: drought and floods are disasters which seem like they would cancel each other out, but don’t. And cities’ demand for water is only mounting. So the battle ahead has several fronts – planning, regulating, innovating, and grieving.
When Planning Is Too Political
Experts say that to predict the future of drought and water availability where you live, look west.
Water has always been more reliable in Texas the farther east you go. The “dry line,” which scientists roughly estimate to cut vertically through Marfa, splits the state into arid and wetter regions. The state’s climatologist, John Nielsen-Gammon, says that as climate change takes place, the line is creeping east.
In Texas, El Paso has often been the leader to follow in responding to water scarcity. The rapidly developing I-35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio is now seeing this shift from humid to arid, beginning to mirror the climate that El Paso has long dealt with.
Central Texas set a new drought of record between late 2007 and 2015. The water flow into the Highland Lakes (which include Lake Austin, Travis, and Buchanan), Austin’s primary source of drinking water, was 60% lower than during the 1950s statewide drought of record.
The 1950s drought of record brought seven years of dead cattle and destroyed crops. It led to lawmakers drafting the first-ever State Water Plan in 1961. Similarly, the new drought of record scared the city of Austin into making a plan.
The city’s reaction was Water Forward, launched in 2018: a plan for Austin’s water sources over the next 100 years, one that considers different climate scenarios that could occur over the next century. The city also bought swaths of land within the Edwards recharge zone, protecting those areas from being developed into impervious cover.
Nonetheless, even if Austin is looking at future water availability through a progressive climate change lens, that doesn’t mean the rest of the state is.
The 2022 State Water Plan, redrawn every five years, estimates that by 2030, Travis County’s demand for water will exceed what exists by 6,867 acre-feet (1 acre-foot is more than 300,000 gallons, or how much water 10 average Texans use in a year). For 2070, they project we’ll be 43,787 acre-feet short of having enough water. The data statewide is even more severe.
Experts have signaled that what utility companies call “easy” water, cheap water from lakes, rivers and aquifers, is drainable. For instance, scientists are closely watching the massive Ogallala aquifer deplete now, which supplies North Texas and states up to Nebraska with water.
At a recent Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance lecture, a concerned resident asked Robert Mace, executive director of Texas State University’s The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, if our resources can sustain the surge of people to Texas that parallels tech and industry development. Our population is, after all, projected to increase by roughly 10% every decade.
“Statewide, the answer is no. And a pretty emphatic no,” Mace replied. “I mean right now, we don’t have enough water. We’re feeling the pinch with the growth, with the drought. We’re going to need to get more creative.”
Mace served on the Texas Water Development Board for 18 years, which authors the State Water Plan. The plan, Mace said, aims to have enough water available to get Texas through another drought of record. What it doesn’t plan for is how rising temperatures over the coming decades will factor into water supplies.
Some experts still think of droughts of record as once-a-century phenomenons, or even every 50 years. The same goes for historic flash flooding events. Mace thinks that people need to shift their mindset. Droughts of record in Texas will likely keep setting and resetting themselves, faster and faster, over the next century, Mace said.
“The [state] Legislature has not been seeking for the Water Development Board to do research on what climate change might become,” Mace said. “It’s too political. And so without the support of the Legislature and state leadership, the board’s not going to wade into doing that.”
Property Rights in the Wild West
A century ago, rule of capture law gave Texans the right to the water under their private land. Problems began when someone overpumped their well, and suddenly their neighbor had no water.
The effect on the shared water source was “like a circular firing squad,” wrote the hydrologist Gregg Eckhardt. “Even so, none had been willing to tackle the issue head on, and you can’t really blame them. In Texas, politicians who dare to suggest that private property rights are less than paramount are routinely placed on rails and escorted from town wearing tar and feathers.”
The same tensions govern water policy today, though they are now tempered by groundwater conservation districts, formed by property owners, which issue well permits and dictate how much water can be pumped from their aquifer. But these districts don’t exist everywhere. The Edwards Aquifer-Barton Springs GCD only governs Austin south of Lady Bird Lake; north of the river, there is no GCD. No one is monitoring the groundwater levels, and well owners can pump at will.
“It’s a Wild West sort of situation with groundwater,” climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said.
Shannon Hamilton, executive director of the Central Texas Water Coalition, is used to getting angry letters from homeowners. More recently, residents tire of following drought restrictions like designated watering days when their neighbors ignore the rules. Others feel it’s a property rights violation when their HOA bans them from xeriscaping or planting native grass.
There are also 44,000 amenity ponds in Texas, man-made to beautify property. The ponds need to fill before runoff can enter rivers, streams, and lakes. According to Hamilton, these ponds can take about 30-50% of watershed rainfall away from public water sources.
“We need at least registration, but preferably regulation on these ponds. But that’s a bill we couldn’t even get filed this session, because it’s a property rights issue,” Hamilton said. “It’s really scary that their property right to have a pond is greater than our right to have water come out of our faucet.”
Private groundwater rights have become an intercity fight. Georgetown signed a contract in 2023 with water asset company Upwell Water to build a pipe to the Carrizo Wilcox aquifer, 80 miles away. The city’s own surface water sources have dwindled with a swelling population. Cities like College Station and Bryan that depend on the aquifer don’t think they have enough water to share, and in March, sued to put a stop to the pipeline construction. Georgetown settled at the end of June to pipe half of the water they had hoped for.
A “Generational Investment”
On November 4, water is going to be on the ballot. By the close of the 89th Legislature at the end of May, Gov. Greg Abbott signed House Joint Resolution 7, calling it a “generational investment” in the future of Texas water availability.
HJR 7 proposes a constitutional amendment that, if approved by voters, will allocate $1 billion a year to the Texas Water Fund for 20 years, from 2027 to 2047. If HJR 7 is voted into effect, then Senate Bill 7 will kick in, giving the TWDB sole authority over how the $20 billion will be used.
SB 7 also lists the types of projects able to be funded, including expensive methods of purifying salty or very dirty water into drinkable water. The state can also use the fund to desalinate seawater along the coast, manually inject water through the ground into aquifers, and fix leaky pipes.
In 2047, both legislative chambers will need to reach another two-thirds vote on yet another constitutional amendment in order to renew the funding for another 20 years.
Texas 2036’s nonpartisan policy researchers said the $20 billion investment is not enough, and projects that $154 billion is needed by 2050 to find new water sources and fix broken water and wastewater systems in Texas.
Of course, it’s not just investment that the state needs. Regulating water-guzzling companies is a step the Legislature has consistently failed to take.
During the session, the Legislature considered SB 2660, which would grant the Hays Trinity GCD the ability to charge a usage fee to prevent the overpumping of the Trinity aquifer by large consumers. The bill was left pending in committee. A related bill, SB 1253, would have allowed GCDs to reduce fees and reward water-conscious developments. It passed easily through the House and Senate, but Gov. Abbott ultimately vetoed it at his desk.
Because the state does little to regulate how much companies can pump, Mace said that local GCDs regularly find themselves at odds with developers and utility companies.
Let’s say a new developer moves into a district with plans to use a great deal of water. The developer requests their water permit, and the district is obligated to grant it. GCD water codes were designed with local, rural landowners in mind who don’t use an unusual amount of water, and the GCD doesn’t impose strict water usage restrictions on permits. As Mace said, “They’re going to have to see those people at the Dairy Queen.”
The developer’s unexpectedly high water usage may make it impossible for the GCD to hit their water availability goals for the coming years. Some districts avoid confrontation because they don’t have the budget to defend themselves against a corporation in court.
“It becomes easier to just curtsy and let them do what they need to do, move the goalposts, and go forward,” Mace said.
Dystopian Futures
The future strategy for Texas water is simply to find more. Desperate for new water sources in the face of inevitable water scarcity, hydrologists returned to an old drought cure idea, dating back to the Dust Bowl era, called cloud seeding.
Climate scientists send up a small airplane, given the mission to drop flares into the gray clouds carrying silver iodide, which mimics ice crystals. The chemical freezes the vapor droplets around it, increasing precipitation.
A cloud’s life endures roughly an hour. The scientists take advantage of that window to make sure the cloud produces more drought-easing rainfall than it otherwise would.
In states like Colorado and Utah, scientists had cloud-seeded around the peak of a mountain to produce more snowflakes, sending the snow melt down the mountainsides and into rivers and lakes. In Texas, a state without such mountains and too warm for snow, they would seed rain.
The physics were proven. It was possible to induce snowfall high up in the Colorado mountains. But today, there’s still no strong scientific consensus that convective storm seeding really works, Mace said. For one, it proved difficult to track the progress of a single cloud. It was difficult to evaluate how much the scientists were actually increasing rainfall.
Nevertheless, the state is sending up cloud-seeding planes. Cloud seeding was included in the alternate water sources section of the 2022 Texas State Water Plan. About 5,000 acre-feet of water from cloud seeding, it states, is recommended in 2070 for irrigation.
Bearing the heavy burden of drought, Texas is bending to lean on several such surreal solutions. Experts long considered direct potable reuse a solution only for the very desperate. It’s a system in which the very dirtiest water, like sewage and that used in fracking to push oil and gas out of the earth, is purified back into drinking water. Mace never thought he would see it become needed in Texas in his career.
The first DPR plant to exist was built in Namibia, the most water-scarce country in southern Africa. About 50 years later, the Colorado River Municipal Water District built the second plant in the world in Big Spring, Texas.
In February, El Paso broke ground to begin constructing its own direct potable reuse plant. More Texas communities are now considering DPR in their local water plans. Mace didn’t think they were actually serious until he picked up the phone and called to ask. He then went to a DPR plant to try the purified water himself. It tasted fine, he said. The city of Austin has recently commissioned its own study on DPR.
HJR 7 and SB 7, if moved ahead by voters in November, will fund desalination plants. Some experts believe marine desalination to be the future of Texas water, more so than purifying wastewater. After all, on the day that we have no water, wastewater will not exist either. Seawater is truly drought-proof, they argue. “We’re not going to drain the Gulf of water,” Mace said.
Other experts warned of the negative effects of marine desalination. All that salt has to go somewhere, usually into the ground along the Texas coast. Salt kills things. Almost all water solutions deal their own environmental damage, whether it’s using huge amounts of energy or producing ever-saltier brackish water. Water solutions can leave a large carbon footprint.
And yet these solutions become ever loftier. Hydrologists at Arizona State University are investigating atmospheric water harvesting, farming water out of the humidity in the air.
Bringing us back down to earth, UT-Austin’s urban ecosystems expert Stuart Reichler reminds us that good old-fashioned water conservation is meaningful, too. In Austin, residents use 63% of the water supply – the minority is commercial use. Things Austinites do actually make a difference toward our city’s water availability. Installing household rain barrels, planting native grass that uses less water, or sticking to your watering day are not insignificant acts.
Reichler regularly leads student interns wearing waders into Austin’s urban creeks to test the water quality. Austinites take for granted their verdant water oasis in a state that is not naturally green, Reichler said. The city is carpeted with diverse flora, some of which will not be able to survive more extreme drought.
He’s describing solastalgia, a specific nostalgia, or grief, for one’s home as it changes with global warming. There’s a certain cognitive dissonance between such collective nostalgia and the state of climate, an irreality. As climate scientists race to make sure we have water, social scientists are developing an entire subfield to study how our brains grieve our changing world.
“For the last couple of decades, we’ve been using this term sustainability. The inference of sustainability is we’re going to be able to maintain things, and that’s just not realistic,” Reichler said. “The more realistic idea is one of resilience. We have to adapt. We’re already fucked.”
Inheritors
Lindsey Holmes realized that she cared for Barton Springs like she would for someone she loved. A patient friend had first taught her to swim in its cool water, to overcome her irrational fear that deep water was somehow malevolent. She then came back, and pushed herself to swim a little farther. On her third visit, she swam a thousand yards. And then one swim, she realized that she felt okay.
Three years later, Holmes can recognize the Barton Springs year-round lap swimmers simply by their strokes, their arms coming out of the water in the early light. Oh, Shelley’s here, Charlie’s here, she thinks to herself, stripping down to her swimsuit on a 17-degree morning in January. In the winter, the water steams, warmer than air.
Holmes applied for an open position at legal advocacy organization Save Our Springs to make preserving Austin’s natural water her life’s work. The health of the Edwards Aquifer and Barton Creek, both feeding the Barton Springs Pool, had become an intimate concern.
“Whatever’s in Barton Creek is coming into my nose. It’s coming into my mouth. It’s coming into my eyes,” Holmes said at the end of June. “I’m in the soup.”
Holmes leads snorkel tours in the Barton Springs Pool, a Save Our Springs educational program. Most of the snorkelers had never been to Barton Springs before. A few others had lifetime relationships with the Springs, but had never put on goggles to be able to see its natural floor.
Under the surface of the water, the limestone breaks into huge shelves to form islands and deep trenches. Twin largemouth bass swim in arcs close to the floor. The silver scales of the Mexican tetra illuminate in bands of sunlight, the water clear as glass in the shallows.
The pool is always full, seemingly eternal even through extraordinary drought. The only way to see the drought’s effects is to look beyond the gate, where the water gushes from the pool into the free side of the creek. The old Barking Springs crowd remembers when it was a veritable waterfall.
Holmes shares her love for natural water swimming with her daughter. “She swims like a fish,” Holmes laughed. In her work for Save Our Springs, Holmes once saw a photo of Twin Falls from the 1990s, Austinites splashing in the green depths.
“I will never see that, how it was. My daughter will never see that. And there’s a sadness there. There’s a grief,” Holmes said.
Water tumbled over the cascades. The creek was fuller than she had ever seen it.
National Disaster Distress Helpline: 800-985-5990, or dial 211 to find mental health resources in Texas.
This article appears in August 8 • 2025.