Ask anyone who’s lived around Austin for a few summers about Lake Travis, and there’s a pretty good chance they’ll bring up how low it can get. It’s a reservoir, managed by the Lower Colorado River Authority, and when a long drought settles over Central Texas, it shrinks. Anyone who depends on it has to deal with that.<\/p>\n
For a boat owner, that’s an annoyance. If you’re one of three cities that pump drinking water off the top of the lake, it’s a much bigger deal. Cedar Park, Leander and Round Rock are in exactly that spot, and since 2022 they’ve been building their way out of it with a deep intake that pulls water from near the bottom of the lake instead. And according to BCRUA, the piece that actually sits in the lake is finished.<\/p>\n
The three cities get their lake water through the Brushy Creek Regional Utility Authority, or BCRUA, a partnership they formed in 2007. Right now its pumps sit on floating barges in Sandy Creek Cove, a fairly deep arm of the lake.<\/p>\n
A floating pump station is basically a pump on a raft. It rides up and down with the water, which sounds clever until the lake drops far enough that the raft starts running out of water underneath it.<\/p>\n
That’s apparently not a hypothetical. BCRUA general manager Sam Roberts told KUT<\/a> that during the worst droughts, those barges were at times “in very near danger of bottoming out.” If that happens, the pumps can’t work, and the taps in three growing cities get a lot less dependable in a hurry.<\/p>\n So why not just tow the barges somewhere deeper?<\/p>\n Well, a barge can only go where the lake is, and the whole problem is that the lake keeps leaving. A deep intake gets around that by putting the opening down near the lake bed, where a drought would have to drain a huge amount of water before the intake got anywhere close to the surface.<\/p>\n According to BCRUA’s construction updates<\/a>, the riser pipes are installed in the lake floor and the intake pipes have been extended, which BCRUA says wraps up Phase 1 of the work on the lake. The page doesn’t put a date on that update, so I can’t tell you exactly when the last pipe went in. BCRUA just lists it as complete.<\/p>\n If “riser pipe” doesn’t mean much to you, think of it as a snorkel in reverse. It’s the vertical section that sticks up out of the lake bed, and it’s where water will actually enter the system once everything’s connected.<\/p>\n From there, the water heads into a tunnel cut through rock under the lake, and that tunnel runs to the pump station on Lime Creek Road. That’s where you’ll find the 300-foot shaft. KUT’s photo captions describe the main shaft as being under the lake, but the project’s designer, Walker Partners<\/a>, puts the pump station some distance from the intakes, built around a 300-foot-deep wet well with a suction chamber below ground, and ENR has placed that pump station on the shore of the lake.<\/p>\n A wet well is basically a deep, water-filled pit that pumps draw from. Gravity takes care of getting lake water down the tunnel and into it. The pumps handle the hard part, which is lifting it 300 feet back up.<\/p>\n Back in 2023, BCRUA’s plans, as described to Texas Contractor, called for six pumps sitting about 300 feet down, deep enough to reach tunnel level. I haven’t seen anything confirming all six are in place yet, so treat that as the design rather than a finished installation.<\/p>\n That’s a pretty serious amount of plumbing just to avoid a raft running aground. Given what’s riding on it, I’d say it’s a fair trade.<\/p>\n Phase 2 is where it gets dramatic. BCRUA says it’ll flood the tunnel and the cavern once all the underground work is done, then pull out the bulkheads and mount the intake screens.<\/p>\n Bulkheads are temporary walls that keep the lake out while people are still working inside. Take them out early and you’ve got a flooded construction site, so they’re the very last thing to go. The screens are pretty much what they sound like: filters over the intake openings that keep debris out of the system.<\/p>\n None of that flooding has happened yet. BCRUA’s own page also lists a final concrete liner for the intake tunnel as work that’s still to come, and apparently getting concrete down there is a job in itself, since BCRUA describes drilling a separate drop shaft off Lime Creek Road just to deliver it. The page doesn’t say how far along that liner is. Frankly, that’s the date I’d most like to see, because nothing gets flooded until the underground work is finished.<\/p>\n Money, mostly. In 2022, BCRUA approved a $224.8 million contract with Thalle Construction Co. and SAK Construction to build the intake system, and Community Impact<\/a> reported the total cost at about $293 million, covered by a mix of cash from the partners and contract revenue bonds.<\/p>\n Michael Thane, Round Rock’s executive director of public works, told KUT that building a separate project for each city would’ve been both challenging and expensive. At those prices, it’s hard to argue with him.<\/p>\n The payoff is capacity. Once it’s finished, BCRUA expects the system to supply 145 million gallons a day, and Thane said Round Rock alone will gain up to 40.8 million gallons a day more. He expects the project to carry Round Rock for the next 30 to 40 years.<\/p>\n If you’re wondering what “million gallons a day” actually measures, it’s a rate. It tells you how much the system can move in 24 hours, which is a different thing from how much it can hold.<\/p>\n There’s one thing the intake won’t do, though. It doesn’t hand the cities any extra water rights. LCRA told Community Impact the intake gives them a more reliable way to reach water they already have under contract, which is arguably the whole point. Think of it as a longer straw for the same glass.<\/p>\n For a sense of how other places have handled the same problem, Las Vegas went after a straw near the bottom of Lake Mead<\/a>, and Enid, Oklahoma, recently finished a steel intake through the bottom of Kaw Lake<\/a>.<\/p>\n Until the new intake opens, Cedar Park, Leander and Round Rock will keep relying on the barges in Sandy Creek Cove. BCRUA still has the system down for 2027, and in January, Go Lake Travis reported the project was running four to six months behind the February 2027 finish it was first scheduled for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ask anyone who’s lived around Austin for a few summers about Lake Travis, and there’s a pretty good chance they’ll … <\/p>\nThe lake work is finished<\/h2>\n
There are still a few big steps left<\/h2>\n
Why are three cities sharing one intake?<\/h2>\n