COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW TO CALCULATE YOUR SHARE OF THE SOG “1 inch of rain falling on 1 acre of land equals roughly 27,154 gallons of water. The City of Houston is roughly 600 square miles, or 384,000 acres (as there are 640 acres in 1 square mile). So 1 inch of rain on the City of Houston gives about 10,427,136,000 gallons of water. With 50 inches of annual rainfall, that comes out to 521,356,800,000 gallons of water a year. All of it freely provided by the heavens. The City of Houston has 2.2 million people. So each person essentially gets 236,980 gallons of ‘free’ rainfall a year.” [Random Poster, commenting on Flushing for Dollars]
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Let’s enact RP concept by paving every inch of Houston so we can capture all that water!
Oh wait, we have common sense and some of actually like to have some vegetation.
Houston and the regions does capture a lot of it’s water in Lake Houston and Lake Conroe. They are the primary reservoirs for our water supply.
I prefer capturing my water on I-10 and HWY 59.
kjb434: Correction. Most of our water comes from Lake Houston and Lake Livingston via the Trinity River and a large diversion canal. The City of Houston does have a water right for water in Lake Conroe, but currently does not receive water from the lake.
For the “random poster”: there really isn’t “free water.” If you want free water, you can capture rainfall on your property, store it, treat it, and distribute it as you see fit. If you don’t want to store, treat, transport, and maintain all of that infrastructure, then you have to pay for it.
Most people, including myself, take the fact that we all have access to clean, safe water almost everywhere we go for granted. However, it takes A LOT of planning, engineering, negotiating, and know how to make that happen.
Over the next few decades, water will become a larger and larger issue. In several places in Texas and the U.S., there will not be enough water to go around. Prices for water will go up and it will just be another cost we all have to deal with just like when gas goes up.
Matt, I didn’t know about the canal system to feed Lake Houston. I know Lake Houston does have a canal system that diverts water to a separate reservoir in the Highlands area to supply raw rater for industrial use (primarily cooling facilities). Good thing too, the current process of converting all the well water facilities most of the MUD’s use to surface water will put more demand on Lake Houston. Having Lake Livingston in the picture makes more since for the large new increase in demand.
As for looming water issues in the future, central Texas is right in that bulls-eye. There many ongoing projects and several future planned ones to get water delivered to many central Texas areas because the demand on the groundwater supply is getting to much. The prices are likely to go up much more in the future when the bond debts grow as more of the projects are put into place.