A drought affecting Lake Georgetown has ended — thanks in part to a massive amount of water pumped from Stillhouse Hollow Lake near Belton to neighboring Williamson County since last year.
The Brazos River Authority said the Georgetown lake rose more than 6 feet over the past few weeks, allowing the agency to remove the reservoir’s Stage 1 drought status designation.
About 45,500 acre-feet of water was pumped from Stillhouse Hollow to Lake Georgetown since May 2020, the agency said. An acre-foot roughly equals about 326,000 gallons — enough water to cover the size of a football field a foot deep.
“Pumping through the Williamson Country Regional Raw Water Line (WCRRWL) began on May 19, 2020, and was stopped on June 3, 2021, due to improved reservoir conditions in the Little River watershed from multiple rainfall events that have occurred since early May,” Aaron Abel, Brazos River Authority Water Services Manager, told the Telegram.
For comparative purposes, Abel said, this volume of water is less than 20 percent of the total amount of water currently stored at Stillhouse Hollow.
The pumping of water occurs when a lack of rainfall and continued water use becomes necessary to meet regional needs, Abel said.
On Saturday, the Bell County reservoir was more than a foot above its normal elevation of 622 feet above sea level, according to data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“Additionally, the elevation of Lake Stillhouse Hollow can be impacted by several factors that include lakeside demands, inflows into the reservoir, evaporation, water supply releases and pumping through the WCRRWL,” Abel said. “Considering all those contributing factors, the capacity of Lake Stillhouse Hollow consistently remained at or above 93 percent full over the period that water was being transferred through the WCRRWL between May 2020 and early June 2021.”
The agency declared Stage 1 drought status for Lake Georgetown in mid-November after six months of sustained pumping through the water line from Stillhouse.
The Brazos River Authority Drought Contingency Plan specifies that Stage 1, a drought watch condition for Lake Georgetown, enables the agency to extend the supply and availability of water during droughts, according to a news release.
The designation affected customers in the cities of Georgetown and Round Rock as well the Bushy Creek Municipal Utility District.
Lake Georgetown was nearly 4 feet below its normal elevation of 791 feet above sea level Saturday, Corps data showed.
The Drought Contingency Plan includes four stages. Each stage is marked by trigger points measured by a lake level, water storage capacity or other hydrologic conditions such as the PHDI that impact long-term drought conditions within the watershed, such as stream flow and departure from average rainfall, the river authority said.
“With the added water supply from recent rainfall, pumping via the WCRRWL was discontinued on June 3, 2021,” the river authority said in its news release.
Although the Stage 1 declaration has been lifted, the Brazos River Authority encourages its customers to use water wisely and conserve at all times.
Local concerns
Bell County elected officials have been concerned for years about groundwater use as Williamson County — one of the nation’s fastest growing areas — relies on Bell resources to quench the demands of its growing population, now estimated at more than 638,000 people. Williamson’s 2010 population was 426,287.
Legislation introduced by local representatives but never approved sought to direct the Texas Water Development Board to conduct a study focusing on the Trinity and Edwards aquifers in Bell, Burnet, Milam, Travis and Williamson counties. A similar study was last conducted in 1999.
Dirk Aaron, general manager of the Belton-based Clearwater Underground Water Conservation District, has been concerned about the significant drawdown of water in southern areas of Bell County.
“We’ve been pretty forthright in saying that something serious is happening to our groundwater, and we need a third-party scientific analysis to determine what the cause is,” Aaron told the Telegram in 2019.
Former Bell County Commissioner Tim Brown, a lifelong resident of Salado and South Bell County, has been one of the most vocal critics against Williamson County’s use of local water resources.
“Oddly, it is still an area that has a fairly low population density,” Brown previously said. “It’s not our growth that is killing the water. The water is going somewhere else.”
Bell County needs
Stillhouse Hollow Lake — initially called Lampasas Lake for its location on the Lampasas River — was built by the Army Corps of Engineers from 1962 to 1968. Congress designated the dam as Stillhouse Hollow Dam in September 1959, according to U.S. government statutes.
The lake at its conservation pool elevation of 622 feet above sea level covers 6,430 acres, with 15,271 acres of public land above the pool.
The lake was created as a regional resource for flood control and supplies drinking water to many local cities.
A new $60 million water treatment plant that the Bell County Water Improvement and Control District No. 1 built is intended to supply drinking water for Killeen, Belton and other area cities.
However, the water board recently announced its treatment plant might not be ready to supply water to area customers until July, more than a month after service was to start.
First slated for completion in 2019, the facility was delayed because of leaks in the plant’s main pipes deep underground, FME News Service reported. Contractors worked to fix the brand-new infrastructure enough to stand up to pressure and regulatory testing.
“It’s been a nightmare, but we are getting close,” said Keith Baker, the district’s deputy general manager, said at a recent meeting.
The addition of the Stillhouse plant will enable the district to provide a maximum of 91 million gallons per day of treated water. The district is treating a maximum of 74 million gallons per day at its water plant on Lake Belton, the county’s other Corps-managed lake.
