By Gabrielle Taite
The city of Lubbock, Texas has made plans to diversify its water supplies to ensure that the city has water for the next 100 years as well as sustain its quality wastewater and water management.
Currently, the city’s main source of water is groundwater which comes from the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority's Roberts County Well Field and Bailey County Well Field, according to the City of Lubbock’s website. Additionally, Lubbock receives water from Lake Meredith and Lake Alan Henry.
Aubrey Spear, Lubbock’s water utilities director, said Lubbock has two wastewater plants and that all the water goes through an extensive process before it is distributed.
“We have water supplies, and we take those water supplies and transport the water here (at Lubbock’s wastewater management building) to Lubbock,” Spear said. “We have water treatment and then we distribute it to our customers and then once they are finished using that water, it goes down our sewer lines and we then deliver it to our wastewater treatment plants and then we determine what we’re going to do with that water after it’s been treated.”
Malcolm Laing, the water resources manager for Lubbock, said the water which is treated is used for many different purposes.
“The excel power plant on the Southeast side of town uses our treated wastewater in order to help generate power,” Laing said. “You can apply it to the land to grow crops or you can discharge it to a creek which is what we do for some of it down by FM 400, and we dispose of up to 4 million gallons a day through that discharge point.”
Laing also said Lubbock treats and distributes water to several other surrounding cities.
Additionally, in 2014, the state of Texas assessed waters to determine whether designated uses were being met, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s website. Of the bodies of water deemed “good water”: 12,910.8 were rivers and streams, 826,254.5 were lakes, reservoirs and ponds, 854,929.4 were bays and estuaries, and 8.3 were coastal shorelines.
Recently, Lubbock has set a 100-year water plan which outlines at least 17 strategies that the city could use to expand its water supply, according to KFYO New Talk’s website. Each strategy is compiled into five different “supply packages” that have their own agenda and are ranked based on eight different criteria such as project cost.
Spear said the water plan is available for the public to see.
“If you need some bedtime reading, it’s about 350 pages,” Spear said. “It talks about all the different strategies that we could put in place to make sure that we have water for the next 100 years.”
Andrew Jackson, a professor of civil environmental construction engineering at Texas Tech, said Lubbock is attempting to shift the way it treats its water in order to comply with the plan.
“Lubbock actually does quite a bit of treatment because they are moving towards reuse,” Jackson said. “They have advanced nutrient removal and filtration even though they’re putting their water into a surface water. They have a fairly state of the art treatment center.”
Jackson also said new water is now being put into the top of the Lubbock City Lake, which requires a much higher level of treatment. He said the eventual idea for putting the water into the canyons is that it will flow down, get pulled back out by the city, and sent to the South water treatment plant which will help the city with its 100-year water plan.
Other places in Texas which have a 100-year water plan include major cities such as Austin, according to the Austin Monitor website. The main goal of the plan, like Lubbock, is to increase water conservation in anticipation of a big population growth and emerging climate change.
Neil Weems, the environmental compliance coordinator for Lubbock, said the city is almost always very accurate when it comes to managing and filtering its water.
“The city of Lubbock has different places that we can go for our wastewater process,” Weems said. “We’re usually within what limits we’re supposed to be in, but if our water is of lesser quality we have a farm to go to which can take higher contaminants because it’s land applied. Our higher quality water goes down stream. We’ve got a pretty good portfolio of how to utilize our water based on our treatment plants performance.”
Lubbock has enough water to meet demand until 2032, according to the KFYO News Talk website. However, it’s possible that a new plan will be needed as early as 2028 if drought projections are exceeded.
Spear said Lubbock is actively seeking new ways to conserve and use water so that citizens may have it for many years to come as well as help to save the environment.
“In the past, we used the water for irrigating crops, and that’s how we got rid of the water,” Spear said. “We have about almost 10,000 acres of land that we can do that on. We’re trying to get away from that because it’s expensive, and there’s more beneficial uses of the wastewater that we could use if we do more treatment.”