Liquidity: Privatization and the Rise of Big Water - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 224

Dallas, dropped to 38 percent of full. Cracked mud lined Lavon's shore, and bleached
tree stumps jutted from stagnant pools of brown water. That year, Texas suffered $4.1
billion in crop and livestock losses. The drought continued into the next year, and the
next. In 2008 almost 48 percent of Texas suffered severe drought conditions, and cattle
producers lost about $1 billion, mostly because their grazing land had turned to dust
and they were forced to buy feed. Between November 2008 and July 2009, nearly 80 of
Texas's 254 counties faced “extreme” or “exceptional” drought, the worst levels on the
US Department of Agriculture's Index, and suffered $3.6 billion worth of crop and live-
stock losses .
In 2009, Texas suffered a combination of record-high heat and record-low precipita-
tion. Central and south Texas were facing the worst conditions since the 1956 drought;
230 cities, including Houston, Austin, and Dallas, set mandatory water restrictions. San
Antonio suffered the driest twenty-three-month period since record keeping began in
1885. Off-duty police officers began patrolling San Antonio's streets for illegal lawn wa-
tering.
Todd Staples , the Texas agriculture commissioner, summed up the conditions with
one word: “devastating.” In July 2009, Governor Perry issued a disaster proclamation,
and $3 billion in federal drought relief flowed to the state.
“A FOREVER SUPPLY OF WATER”
One afternoon in October 2006, T. Boone Pickens tilted his lean seventy-eight-year-old
body back in an enormous brown leather chair in his Dallas office, propped his pointy-
toed black cowboy boots up on a corner of his wide brown desk, and gave me an owl-
ish look. “It's just gettin' drier and drier out there,” he drawled in an amused voice. He
handed me a sheaf of articles about Mesa Water, many of which were critical of his plans
to suck water from the Ogallala. But they also noted that a lack of rain combined with a
population boom could push Texas into an unprecedented drought.
Pickens had signed up two hundred landowners, representing four hundred thou-
sand acres in Roberts County, to participate in a deal between Mesa Water and a thirsty
metropolis willing to pay his rates. He had no buyer yet, but Pickens is a legendarily pa-
tient dealmaker.
he Ogallala Aquifer “is just surplus water,” he said as he sketched his pipeline route
on a whiteboard. “That water is just stranded out there, doing nothing. It's not needed in
the Panhandle, which is very rough country not suited to farming. Why should I store
water for nothing? You have an asset here, but it's a dead asset until you create a market
for it. Meanwhile, north Texas is just exploding. Why not pipe the water out of Roberts