I’ve been diving into our water crisis for a while now in my series called Water Watch, but today let’s look at some of the science that’s brought us to the position we’re in right now and the science behind some of the decisions our local leaders will have to make soon.
Let’s start off with one of the most common questions I get: How much water do we really need? How much water do we need to bring our reservoirs, Choke Canyon and Lake Corpus Christi, back up to 100% capacity? Well, as of today’s numbers, we need 258 billion gallons of water to recover.
So we’ve been describing that amount of water to you in different units, acre-feet, percentages, millions of gallons, gallons, etc. Let’s talk about what ‘Mother Nature’ could do to bring those numbers to reality for us.
So an average thunderstorm drops about 17.4 million gallons. I often hear folks say, “Well, we just need a little tropical storm, a hurricane, some kind of ‘tropical trouble’. An average hurricane produces about 2.4 trillion gallons of water, and it also brings other impacts like extreme winds, tornadoes, storm surge, not exactly desirable, but let’s entertain the conversation.
If a thunderstorm were to fix our problem, we would need 15,000 thunderstorms to achieve that much water. And as far as the tropical trouble goes, well, we don’t need an entire hurricane; we could use just ten percent of the water in one hurricane— and again, those negative impacts. Plus, right now the tropics are looking fairly quiet, so that’s not exactly an option. ‘Mother Nature’ doesn’t want help us it seems…