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Posted (edited)
10 hours ago, Orange&White said:

LCRA just notified of Wirtz and Starcke releases tonight.

I saw someone say one flood gate at each. LT will come up some how much? Let’s see… 640 last night, 641.60 this morning.

Edited by troph
Posted
1 hour ago, troph said:

I saw someone say one flood gate at each. LT will come up some how much? Let’s see… 640 last night, 641.60 this morning.

Forecasts are 2-3 feet when all said and done.  

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  • 3 months later...
Posted

We started the year at about 37.5% full and are currently sitting at 43.9%. Managed to avoid disaster but also didn’t make any real progress. 

Always feels like a game of Russian roulette when we start the year below 50%. One dry spring followed by a normal summer and we could easily be less than 30%.

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  • 3 months later...
Posted

Not going to bother with a new thread. Still hanging in there at 42% as we enter the months with the best chance for rain before the extended hellscape summer.

Some major housing developments south of Austin have been put on hold due to water concerns. 

Posted
On 4/12/2025 at 11:59 AM, Larry T. Spider said:

Some major housing developments south of Austin have been put on hold due to water concerns. 

I guess some good comes from everything...

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Posted
37 minutes ago, wd40 said:

along the same lines, it would be good to let LCRA know what you think about the Burnet rock crusher water permit (unless you're in favor of it, in which case, you can go violently fuck yourself).

https://www.saveburnet.com

Even if the legislature backs down, we'll get an executive order mandating that there be a rock crusher located there, and without any monitoring.

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Posted
On 4/12/2025 at 11:59 AM, Larry T. Spider said:

Not going to bother with a new thread. Still hanging in there at 42% as we enter the months with the best chance for rain before the extended hellscape summer.

Some major housing developments south of Austin have been put on hold due to water concerns. 

Yep.  This is not going to be a good year for water-related activities outside of the bedroom.

Is The Lake Full Yet?

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Posted
On 4/12/2025 at 11:59 AM, Larry T. Spider said:

Some major housing developments south of Austin have been put on hold due to water concerns. 

Good.  Please do all your building NE.  Thx.

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Posted
On 4/12/2025 at 11:59 AM, Larry T. Spider said:

Not going to bother with a new thread. Still hanging in there at 42% as we enter the months with the best chance for rain before the extended hellscape summer.

Some major housing developments south of Austin have been put on hold due to water concerns. 

If you’re talking about the ones in Comal County, those are Canyon Lake related. Which is another train wreck in progress. Making all-time lows every single day baby! 

Posted
2 hours ago, Wilcox Cummingtonite said:

If you’re talking about the ones in Comal County, those are Canyon Lake related. Which is another train wreck in progress. Making all-time lows every single day baby! 

Yes. Canyon Lake is 46% full, although it looks lower. I know the legislature was supposed to address water issues this session but I haven’t seen any specifics. Once the big home builders have to slow down their central Texas expansion, I’m sure things will get moving!

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Posted
8 hours ago, Larry T. Spider said:

Yes. Canyon Lake is 46% full, although it looks lower. I know the legislature was supposed to address water issues this session but I haven’t seen any specifics. Once the big home builders have to slow down their central Texas expansion, I’m sure things will get moving!

Legislature is going to have to take over zoning and permit approvals. Can't let the locals think they have a say!

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

lavon is at 493'

spillway crest elevation is 475'

the watershed just received 3"

they are going to have to contemplate opening the spillway

flood gates are topped at 503'

maximum (engineering/load) design elevation is 509'

top of the dam is 514'

it's been 13 years since the gates were opened

why we don't have a solar/archimedes pipe/screw system to move this water west is beyond me

 

Posted
1 hour ago, Hagbard Celine said:

lavon is at 493'

spillway crest elevation is 475'

the watershed just received 3"

they are going to have to contemplate opening the spillway

flood gates are topped at 503'

maximum (engineering/load) design elevation is 509'

top of the dam is 514'

it's been 13 years since the gates were opened

why we don't have a solar/archimedes pipe/screw system to move this water west is beyond me

 

There's about a billion reasons why.  Just the pipeline (without accounting for pumping infrastructure) is around $4 million a mile (probably closer to $5 million these days).  Materials, construction, land acquisition, regulatory costs, etc.  It's around 225 miles between Lavon and Travis.  So, there you go, around $1 billion just for the pipe.  Then add a couple hundred million for pumping infrastructure, then add pumping costs when it's transferring water, which it can only do every so often (as you noted....they haven't had so much water that they've needed to open gates for 13 years).  So in between, that pipeline is just sitting there, gathering dust.

Transporting large volumes of water long distances (anything over 20 miles or so) is a ginormous, very, very expensive proposition.  And people scream if their water rate goes up 5%.  So....nope, not gonna happen.

Eventually, Texas is going to have to undertake some REALLY expensive options....because we avoided those options when they were more affordable.

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Posted
11 minutes ago, Hate said:

Sounds like we need the Romans.

Longest Roman aqueduct was around 250 miles.  Of course....material and land acquisition costs were a BIT lower (stone....and the empire just took shit).  And you can't beat the labor costs -- slaves, fed a coupla bowls of gruel a day.

No worries, though.  I'm sure that there are folks in Texas leadership looking at how to "get rid of burdensome regulations" so we can follow the Roman model more closely.

Infrastructure is expensive, but it's also an investment.  And America, 2025....we don't do investment.  We just treat everything as OPEX, and OPEX is bad, so don't spend any OPEX.

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Posted
There's about a billion reasons why.  Just the pipeline (without accounting for pumping infrastructure) is around $4 million a mile (probably closer to $5 million these days).  Materials, construction, land acquisition, regulatory costs, etc.  It's around 225 miles between Lavon and Travis.  So, there you go, around $1 billion just for the pipe.  Then add a couple hundred million for pumping infrastructure, then add pumping costs when it's transferring water, which it can only do every so often (as you noted....they haven't had so much water that they've needed to open gates for 13 years).  So in between, that pipeline is just sitting there, gathering dust.
Transporting large volumes of water long distances (anything over 20 miles or so) is a ginormous, very, very expensive proposition.  And people scream if their water rate goes up 5%.  So....nope, not gonna happen.
Eventually, Texas is going to have to undertake some REALLY expensive options....because we avoided those options when they were more affordable.

I bet you’re low by $2-3B to get a project like that done. Look at the Integrated Pipeline Project by Tarrant Regional Water Authority pipelining water from Lake Palestine and tying into pipelines from Cedar Creek and Richland Chamber to Benbrook. Some of it was a new 108” section and they spent $2.5B for a shorter distance and easier digging terrain.


https://www.trwd.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/IPLQuarterlyExecutiveSummary-202409_FINAL_web-compressed.pdf
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Posted

can we settle on $50k/mile?

and agree that if imminent domain doesn't allow a straight line route, then the route might have to wind around a bit?  and if so can we agree that we will put a 10% TARIFF on the cost per mile to account for windier segments?

and can we then agree that landowners who allow the pipe to sit above ground get a small fractional taste of the action in perpetuity?  said taste that can be sold like mineral rights or water rights?

let's get agreement on this stuff before we move on to advanced geometry

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Posted
12 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

Diameter matters....a lot.  See the 108 inch (which is the kind of pipe you're talking about) in the Tarrant Regional Project above.  Trust me, my $1 billion figure for a Lavon-Travis line is certainly WAY low.  

Sewer pipe is also quite different than a raw water line (sewer lines generally are not run under any pressure, for example).

Large-scale water transport is super-expensive business.  Always has been (otherwise, the easy idea of "just build a pipeline from wet areas to dry areas" would have been done 100 times the past 75 years.  Instead, such projects are few and far between.  

Posted

i'm not talking about a 108" pipe - i didn't say that

sewer pipe is perfectly fine to move water from one lake to another

my system architecture has nothing to do with moving treated water

i trust you but i don't really care - your argument about jabillon/opex is not relevant here and the germaines got nothin to do with it

box

outside

Posted

Water distribution requires big pipes as I noted above.

City of Austin used about 112k acre-ft of water in 2024 (slightly down from historical numbers) from the LCRA.

Thats 3.65 x 10^10 gal/yr or 100mm gpd or 65k gpm which requires a 48” pipe to flow with a velocity of 10 ft/s. Big pipes flowing round the clock just to keep up with usage demand, never mind trying to top off a lake.

Posted
12 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

i'm not talking about a 108" pipe - i didn't say that

sewer pipe is perfectly fine to move water from one lake to another

my system architecture has nothing to do with moving treated water

i trust you but i don't really care - your argument about jabillon/opex is not relevant here and the germaines got nothin to do with it

box

outside

I hear you.  And I'm trying to be nice and not come across as patronizing, honestly, I am.  I don't have time to write up everything that goes into this, but I deal with very large water utilities (including raw water sales and transport issues) all the time.  I know firsthand what these projects entail (although the last time I was elbows-deep in possible costs for one was 5-6 years ago....and I know that costs have skyrocketed since then).  And the "trust me" part is as to my comment that lifetime water system engineers and the like, with decades of experience, have designed/proposed and sometimes built projects like these for decades.  If there was a massive money-saving "cheat code," trust me -- they'd have done it.

As just one point, explaining why these projects are ALWAYS going to use very large diameter pipe.....you've acquired the land.  You're incurring the cost of installation and construction.  Knowing those things, you never, ever want to come even CLOSE to being undersized on your pipe.  Which means you go big.  And all of those things together mean high costs.  Here's a note on one of the largest raw water supply projects that's been completed in our lifetime, using 96 inch pipe (and canals, which are most suitable on relatively flat, easy-to-dig terrain:

Quote

The Luce Bayou Interbasin Transfer Project (LBITP) is the largest raw water supply project built in Southeast Texas in the past 50 years. The LBITP transfers surface water to Lake Houston from the Trinity River located in Liberty County, Texas. It is comprised of the 500 MGD Capers Ridge Pump Station, 3 miles of Dual 96-inch Diameter Pipelines and 23.5 Miles of Earthen Canal.

It is the mission and business of a shitload of people to try to get water from where it is to where it's needed.  There has been a metric shit-ton of "outside the box" thinking on water supply the past 50+ years (a good example is Aquifer Storage and Recovery).  The people in the industry are in world-wide networks, attend massive global conferences on new ideas and projects, read all the literature you can imagine.  If some water provider in Slovenia came up with a clever workaround to transport thousands of acre-feet of water cheaply . .  . it would be written about and shared industry-wide within a year.  If your ideas were viable and yielded meaningful cost savings, they would have been done.  I'm not saying that to denigrate your brainstorming....I'm suggesting to you that thousands of really clever people who know everything there is to know about engineering water projects think about this stuff every single day, trying to find the most effective and cost-effective solutions.  They aren't just proposing the same-old same-old.  Anything new, they run the simulation and the numbers.

Posted
3 hours ago, Hagbard Celine said:

lavon is at 493'

spillway crest elevation is 475'

the watershed just received 3"

they are going to have to contemplate opening the spillway

flood gates are topped at 503'

maximum (engineering/load) design elevation is 509'

top of the dam is 514'

it's been 13 years since the gates were opened

why we don't have a solar/archimedes pipe/screw system to move this water west is beyond me

 

Beyond the cost is the small matter of getting an interbasin transfer.  The water in Lake Lavon is owned by the North Texas Municipal Water District.  Even assuming NTMWD would sell some of that water to LCRA (Hint: it wouldn't), it'd have to get a permit from TCEQ to transfer that water from the Trinity River Basin to the Colorado River Basin (somehow skipping over the Brazos).  That permit wouldn't be forthcoming because, among other people, Houston would pitch an absolute fit because that would mean less water going into Lake Livingston.

So no--forget about it.

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