From the Texas AWWA: Houston, Texas: A Big City with a Growing Thirst for Drinking Water

Public policy analysis from the Texas Chapter of the American Water Works Association - a professional association. 

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As the fourth largest city in the United States, Houston’s sheer physical size (a service area of 640 square miles) adds to the challenge of planning for its population in the years to come. The City of Houston’s Drinking Water Operations’ three major surface water plants and dozens of water wells (Department of Public Works and Engineering and Public Utilities Division) currently produce more than 146 billion gallons of drinking water which is distributed through over 7,500 miles of pipe each year.

Houstonians have long lived with what could be viewed as an overabundance of adverse physical characteristics. These add a multitude of complications to any calculus for Houston futurists.

. . . Because of land subsidence, Houston area city leaders were mandated to end the use of groundwater in Harris, Galveston and Fort Bend counties and convert to surface water instead. According to its website, the State of Texas created the Houston-Galveston Subsidence District in 1975. The Subsidence District provides guidelines for, and facilitates compliance with, the mandate. The agency’s mission is “to provide for the regulation of groundwater withdrawal throughout Harris and Galveston counties for the purpose of preventing land subsidence which leads to increased flooding.”

“In terms of subsidence issues, the City has been very successful in reducing dependency on groundwater at the present time; only 20 percent of the City’s water comes from groundwater. In the next several years, that percentage will be further reduced, so the City remains in compliance with subsidence district’s mandates,” stated Yvonne Forrest, City of Houston, Public Utilities Senior Assistant Director in a Texas Water Conservation Association (TWCA) Confluence article in 2016.

The conversion process to surface water is expected to be complete by 2025. It is anticipated that subsidence should be controlled in 2020 and halted by 2030.

The twin concerns—land subsidence and an exploding population—have become the two major drivers in the quest for additional surface water supplies for the City of Houston.

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