Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Drought threatens West Texas town's existence

Garrett Gilliam stared hard into the brown hills beyond the drying lake bed as a vaporous black column spiraled into the cloudless West Texas sky. Maybe it was smoke; maybe just another heat-driven dust devil. Either way, trouble was in the air. A young man in a white cowboy hat, Gilliam is Coke County's agricultural extension agent and a volunteer firefighter. He has witnessed firsthand the impact of a near-unprecedented drought that has depleted Robert Lee's water supply and spawned more than three dozen wildfires that have raced across the region's arid hills this year. “That's in the next county,” Gilliam muttered, lowering his eyes, his relief evident. With Texas gripped in a seemingly intractable drought that state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon has declared the worst single-year dry spell in 116 years, Robert Lee, population 1,106, has emerged as an alarming worst-case example of what scant rainfall and triple-digit temperatures can do. Since January, Robert Lee — named for the iconic Army officer who pursued Indians through the region before the Civil War — has received only 3 inches of rain, about a fourth of its midyear average. Daily temperatures routinely approach 110 degrees in the shade. The E.V. Spence Reservoir on the nearby Colorado River — Robert Lee's source of drinking water — is more than 99 percent empty. Without a miraculous meteorological turnaround, this town 30 miles north of San Angelo could be bone dry by early next year. The drought has collapsed lake-based tourism in the town that once called itself “The Playground of West Texas,” led longtime ranchers to sell their livestock and prompted town dwellers to consider moving elsewhere...more

No comments: