Triple digits today...sigh! Heat advisory today. Besides the area water restrictions (Stage II), our water company has the RO system out and is trucking water in here, boil water alert, the notice said don't water the landscape (until when?), the Exceptional Drought, Extreme Drought and Severe Drought areas are spreading fast in Texas. And I've heard many areas of Texas are experiencing a big problem with grasshoppers stripping foliage off plants...but we aren't having an increase of those here. As far as water, we're paying the price for rampant over-development in areas where water has been a big problem for a long time and it can only get worse. Not to mention how they're going to keep up with the need for ever-increasing demands on electricity usage. Only the economic woes (not yet so bad here compared with other parts of the country, but will get worse, I'm betting) is finally slowing down the overpopulation/overdevelopment in southcentral Texas.
http://drought.unl.edu/DM/DM_state.htm?TX,S
This message was edited Jul 9, 2009 1:23 PM
Drought, triple digits and water problems
I can feel your pain. We've got some of the same problems here. Housing shortage? How about a people surplus? I don't want to deprive anyone of the right to live where they want, but what can you do?
Development is a bit of a sore point with me. We live in a fairly sparsely populated rural county, something over 44,000 population. Just to the east of our county, there is a county with a large city...San Antonio. We live in a small subdivision in the NE corner of the county. Just next to that was a ranch of 1766 acres. Now it's in the hands of a greedy developer that, according to current plans, wants to divide it into 23,000 lots and build houses on them. San Antonio has turned down their requests for water. Plans call for a small sewage treatment facility (with nobody present onsite) which would dump treated effluent into a creek. Just a nice, small creek, very little flow. It would destroy this area, sucking dry our aquifer and polluting everything. Not to mention the crime and congestion. I don't know how many people would live there, but possibly about 60,000? More than twice the population of the entire county. There's a possibility that they will sell the property if things don't go their way...but who would buy it at their high price? It's already listed for sale, but officially they are still planning to develop it. We have a small organization fighting this. Like David against Goliath or something.