With drought persisting and pressure from customers, LCRA likely to cut off rice farmers in 2013
With a stubborn drought depriving Central Texas of rain, and facing pressure from Austin and key state lawmakers, the board of the Lower Colorado River Authority likely will decide Tuesday to release no water this year for most downstream farmers.
At an emergency meeting the board will take up a recommendation by its staff to ask the state environmental agency for special permission to withhold releases from rice farmers if the combined storage of lakes Travis and Buchanan, the chief reservoirs for Central Texas, is less than 850,000 acre-feet on March 1.
The lakes now are at 824,000 acre-feet, or 41 percent of capacity, and forecasters predict dry weather for the next few months.
An acre-foot of water roughly equals the amount of water three average Austin households use in a year.
More at http://www.statesman.com/news/news/with-drought-persisting-and-pressure-from-customer/nTmXy/ .
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