The thunderstorms that dumped 5 inches of rain on a very thirsty Lubbock did little to raise the lake level at Alan Henry, the city’s only reservoir.
Tighter water restrictions are still coming Sunday.
“We’re still on track for Stage 2,” Aubrey Spear, director of the city’s water resource department, said Tuesday.
“I’m happy that we’re back to our norms for this time of year. But we’ve been in a four-year drought and it will take time to recover. Just because you have a good week of rain doesn’t mean that you’ve recovered from the drought.”
Lubbock has received 5.23 inches since Thursday, pushing the city’s year-to-date total to 6.13 inches, which is slightly above normal.
The much-needed rain only gave a slight bump to Lake Alan Henry.
The water level was up Tuesday eight-tenths of an inch over a week ago, according to waterdatafortexas.org, which tracks reservoir levels across the state.
Lake Alan Henry received 1.21 inches of rain in the system that blew through West Texas over the holiday weekend.
To date, the lake has gotten 2.64 inches, according to the National Weather Service in Lubbock. Annually Lake Alan Henry, which is 60 miles southeast of Lubbock in Garza County, averages about what the Hub City does — roughly 19 inches of rainfall.
Nearby Post in Garza County only received 1.18 inches of rain over the long weekend. City officials look at Garza County’s tallies to see rainfall totals over Lake Alan Henry’s watershed.
“They kind of got the short end of the stick in the latest rainfall,” said Jeff Vitale, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Lubbock.
In the past three months, Lake Alan Henry has lost another 2 feet of water. That’s about what the city takes from the lake in a year.
Today, the reservoir is 60 percent full.
Calculating water loss is tricky because the length and width of the lake changes as the level drops. No 2 feet of water yield the same volume. But if they did, that would mean Lake Alan Henry has lost roughly 1 billion gallons of water in the past three months.
The holiday rains were widespread, giving a boost to the state’s reservoirs.
“Just about the entire state got rain,” Vitale said.
San Angelo got 7.42 inches over five days, Vitale said.
Across the state, Texas reservoirs gained 55,679 acre feet of water. An acre foot is the equivalent of 1 acre of surface area 1 foot deep, or 325,853 gallons.
Texas reservoirs are about 65 percent full.
Lubbock’s reservoir level raised slightly more than some and not near as much as others.
In the Panhandle, Lake Meredith, which at one time served Lubbock and Amarillo, gained about a third of an inch. White River, which provides water to the cities of Post, Crosbyton, Ralls and Spur, gained a little more than 2 feet.
O.H. Ivie Reservoir, which provides water to San Angelo, rose nearly 8 feet. And, Lake Nasworthy, a small municipal lake in San Angelo, got a big boost from the rain. Last week Lake Nasworthy was at 50 percent capacity and this week it’s full, said Anthony Wilson, a city spokesman.
San Angelo was within weeks of declaring Stage 3 water restrictions, which would have prohibited all outside watering, Wilson said.
Although the recent rains were a respite to the drought-weary region, Lubbock still has only received about half its normal rainfall since 2011.
The majority of the state is still under drought conditions, according to this week’s Texas Drought Report by the Texas Water Development Board. And about a fourth of the state, including Lubbock, remains in an exceptional drought, the severest category.
“We caught up here, but it may not last long,” Vitale said. “We’re probably going to fall below normal again in the next week.”