by Bill McCann
Although I have gone canoeing on the lower Colorado River between Austin and Bastrop many times, one trip I remember better than the others. It was a warm spring morning. We were wearing more layers of sun block than clothes. The river was flowing well, thanks to water releases the previous day from Mansfield Dam above Austin. The water was clear and chilly.
We steered away from occasional floating logs and trees hanging out over the water. Turtles were already sunning themselves on logs along the shore, and a great blue heron waited patiently in a tree on the opposite shore until we passed. Directly above us, a Mexican eagle hung in the sky on an air current, then drifted off behind us and out of sight.
As the river curved, we moved away from shallows on the left bank and saw a small herd of cattle standing leg-deep in the water, drinking. As we paddled around the animals, one person in our canoeing party expressed concern about the cattle messing up the water.
That’s when another member of the group pointed out that seeing the animals drink the river water was a good thing. He reminded us about the mid 1980s when landowners downstream of Austin complained that their cows refused to drink the water. Those were the days when the City of Austin was slow to build new wastewater treatment facilities to keep up with the growth of its population and was discharging inadequately treated wastes into the river. To its credit, the city responded to the public outcry by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to expand and upgrade its wastewater treatment facilities, making them some of the best in the state.
I was reminded of that particular river trip when reports came back this past summer that parts of the river downstream of Austin experienced heavy growth of aquatic vegetation such as water hyacinth, hydrilla and algae. In some places aquatic plants became a real nuisance, extending bank to bank and affecting the use of the river as well as its overall quality. I wondered whether the river had failed the cow test again.
In normal years, water gets released regularly from the Highland Lakes reservoirs, lakes Buchanan and Travis, and flows downriver. Much of it is for agricultural irrigation in the lower counties. The water mixes with, and dilutes, the effluent discharged to the river from Austin’s wastewater treatment facilities.
But the past couple of years have not been normal. Drought conditions have resulted in greatly reduced releases from the reservoirs for agriculture. As a result, sometimes most of the water in the river below Austin has been nutrient-rich effluent. The nutrients serve as a kind of fertilizer for aquatic plants. Water quality monitoring over the past year showed frequent high levels of nutrients in the river, especially in Bastrop.
Now, I don’t know whether the cows stopped drinking the water this summer. I didn’t check with them. But I do know that we all have a stake in keeping the river healthy, whether it’s rainy times or dry times, and whether we live upstream of the Highland Lakes or downstream. It is a very special resource that deserves to be protected.
The Texas Colorado belongs to no one group – not people with homes along the river and Highland Lakes; not the residents of Austin and other communities who drink it and irrigate their landscapes with it; not industries and power plants that depend on it to operate; and not the farmers who use it to grow rice and other products. The river belongs to everyone and what we do in one part of the river system inevitably affects the other parts. When the system gets out of balance, for whatever reason, we have a problem.
Canoeists certainly know it, and so do the cows.
Bill McCann, fisherman and communicator, has been paying close attention to the river for three decades.