The San Antonio Water System could be told as early as next week by a state agency to reduce how much water it pumps out of the Edwards Aquifer — such a mandate that would have been a lot scarier 30 years ago, when San Antonio was completely reliant on the aquifer for drinking water.
However, because the water utility has been diversifying its water sources portfolio since 2000, SAWS official say they are ready for the extreme cutbacks.
SAWS President and CEO Robert Puente told the San Antonio Report on Wednesday that he doesn’t think the impacts will be widely felt by local residents.
Puente says he’s not worried about the restrictions “because of the planning [SAWS has] been doing. Not just this year, but year upon year.”
SAWS only gets about half of its water from the Edwards Aquifer — a massive underground reservoir that provides water to 2 million people in Central Texas including San Antonio — with the other half coming from a mix of sources including recycled water, Canyon Lake, and the Trinity Aquifer.
About a quarter of SAWS water today comes in from Burleson County via the Vista Ridge pipeline, which draws water down from the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer to San Antonio.
SAWS customers have been under the utility’s new stricter watering rules since July to conserve water usage.
During a “State of our Aquifer” luncheon Wednesday, officials from the Edwards Aquifer Authority, the state-level groundwater district that regulates how much water permit holders can pump out of the Edwards Aquifer, said the continuation of the severe drought over Central Texas could push the agency to implement Stage 5 cutbacks on San Antonio area permit holders. San Antonio has been in Stage 4 cutbacks since Sept. 19.
Under Stage 5 cutbacks, permit holders — such as SAWS — would have to reduce how much water they pump out of the Edwards Aquifer by 44% of their authorized annual withdrawal amounts. Since its inception in 1993, the authority has never instituted Stage 5 restrictions on San Antonio Area permit holders.
These cutbacks help to ensure that the aquifer is not over-extracted, which helps safeguard sensitive ecosystems and species that depend on the aquifer’s flow.
Stage 5 cutbacks for the San Antonio area are triggered when the 10-day average level at the aquifer’s J-17 Index Well in Bexar County drops below 625 feet above mean sea level, or the 10-day average spring flow at the Comal Springs falls below 45 cubic feet per second. As of Wednesday afternoon, the J-17 well was sitting at 625.45 feet above mean sea level, about 7 inches lower than it was this time last year.
“The current drought has significantly lower water levels than we’ve experienced for droughts of these magnitudes over the history of the aquifer system,” said Paul Bertetti, the authority’s senior director of aquifer science research and modeling. “Why is that? Well, we’ve had significantly less rainfall … we’re really in a deficit.”
He noted that Uvalde-area permit holders have been under Stage 5 cutbacks since April.
Unfortunately, severe drought conditions look like they will continue through the winter, Bertetti noted, adding San Antonio usually sees more rain in September and October than it has this year.
As climate change pushes Texas droughts to be longer and more severe, the Edwards Aquifer Authority is looking at ways it can help its permit holders continue to be ready for drought, said Roland Ruiz, general manager of the Edwards Aquifer Authority.
For much of the authority’s history that has been through “the stick” method, Ruiz said, referring to the hefty fines the authority can slap permit holders with if they pump above the set cutbacks during a drought. Ruiz said the authority is now looking at more “carrot” methods — incentive programs that can encourage permit holders to save water even during times of plenty.
“Today, we’re finally in a place where I think we can actually think about the future,” Ruiz said. “We can plan for the future with some optimism and with some creativity that we simply just could not do in our near past.”