Storms pelt area, but not enough to break drought
Outages leave as many as 7,600 Austin Energy customers powerless.
Most of Austin’s weekend events had better luck gambling with the weather gods than the Austin Reggae Festival did the previous weekend, with the most recent wave of storms holding off the worst of it until just after 1 a.m. Monday.
The line of storms stretching from the Rio Grande to North Texas dropped as much as an inch of rain in some parts of Travis County and triggered widespread power outages again, this time leaving as many as 7,600 Austin Energy customers without power.
The culprits for most of the outages, as ever, were downed trees and limbs felled by strong winds that accompanied the rain.
In the last week or so, we’ve had some crazy stuff: Isolated heavy rain, instances of flash flooding and hailstorms. Once again we’re left asking: What’s up with the weather?
“I think we’re in a pattern that’s a little different from what we’ve seen in a number of years because of El Niño,” said Lower Colorado River Authority meteorologist Bob Rose.
Roughly speaking, El Niño refers to a prolonged, periodical warming of the tropical waters in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean that affects weather and climate around the globe, especially in Central Texas.
“We’re getting spring rains we really haven’t seen since 2010. It’s kind of hard to get used to this,” Rose said. “The fact that we’re seeing a lot of severe weather as well is pret-
ty typical.”
Rose said the pace of severe weather events should start to slow in early to mid-June.
“The month of May is our peak. Beyond the first half of June, it quiets down,” he said.
The good news is that the U.S. Drought Monitor no longer considers Austin or most of the metro area to be under drought conditions because of relatively replenished soil moisture, farm stock tanks and the like.
According to the Texas Water Development Board, only 34 percent of the state is in drought, the lowest percentage recorded since the beginning of the current drought in 2010.
But as far as the Highland Lakes and the Colorado River are concerned, it’s the same old story. Lakes Buchanan and Travis, which provide the region’s water supply, are only 38 percent full, according to the LCRA.
The lake level on Lake Travis at Mansfield Dam is 629.5 feet above mean sea level.
That’s more than 50 feet below full capacity and only about 15 feet shy of its historic low of 614 feet in 1951.
“Our lakes have come up a little but not nearly enough to make a dent,” Rose said. “The drought is starting to get better, but from a water supply perspective, it’s still raging on.”