In a recent news article found on KXAN published by Robert Maxwell on September 12, 2014, talks about how record development puts drinking water at risk. According to environmental experts, due to record numbers of development projects going on in some counties ranging from Williamson County to the north, south through Travis and Hays County; saids that a major source of cleaning drinking water which is stored in the Central Texas Edwards Aquifer, is under an increasing threat of contamination or pollution and that they are concerned that the state agency in charge of enforcing rules to protect that water source will fall behind.
Development plans that were submitted to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) were at an all-time high in 2014 fiscal year. “Records show the state received pollution mitigation plans from 768 construction projects this year.” These mitigation plans are to show how a contractor put measures in place to control the flow of dirt and other contaminates from reaching the aquifer, which once native vegetation is removed from a construction site, a good rainstorm can wash contaminates into the aquifer through creeks.
Susan Jablonski, who is TCEQ’s Area Manger, states “We are working actually on outreach for companies and contractors and sprucing up our website to have more resource available.”
Clearly, Texas is expanding and it’s not likely that the growth will slow down anytime soon. With more job offers in Texas, people will relocate and we have to put these people somewhere. What we once saw that was open land are no longer open land. They have been developed into businesses or house/apartment complexes, etc. So as the population in Texas grows, if we don’t try to help preserve what/how much we use and if developments/construction aren’t careful not to damage the aquifer, we will soon run out of clean drinking water.
Our body can survive for more than three weeks without food. Look at Gandhi, he survived 21 days of complete starvation, however surviving without water is a different story. Our body can only survive three to four days, a week maximum depending on the person and the current environmental temperature. Just like the saying, “You never know what you had until its gone,” and once it’s gone, how or what will we do for water?
