At the beginning of the month, I had a column in the paper talking about a study saying the Dallas area is in much better shape than many of the nation's big metropolitan areas in terms of water supply. Now it turns out we're betting the farm and risking the extinction of the entire system.
Jen Sorensen
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No good news goes unpunished, in this case by a mollusk, which is being given a big assist by thirsty North Texans.
We all get this: If our water system dies, the region dies. In the search for extra-terrestrial life, they don't look for the planets with no water. Same thing for cities.
This story involves a gamble, not certain doom. We could win this turn of the wheel, but some people who know a lot about the issue wonder why we want to play.
In just a few short years, Lake Texoma has become heavily infested with zebra mussels, a small bivalve mollusk (looks like a little clam) that started showing up in North America in the late 1980s. Scientists think they came here as unwanted stowaways on ships from Central Europe and Eurasia.
Away from natural predators and other conditions that hold them in check in their native lands, zebra mussel populations here explode like nukes in fresh water, sucking the life out of lakes in a few short years. Their capacity to multiply and kill entire food chains is so frightening that they already are considered a serious threat to the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes are oceans. They hold 21 percent of the world's surface fresh water. If zebra mussels can threaten the ecology of something that vast, what do we think they could do to our reservoirs in North Texas?
Cliff Moore, a North Texas naturalist and critic of current policy on zebra mussels at Texoma, says: "We stand to risk all of the lakes, rivers, streams and wetlands in the state of Texas if we don't quarantine Lake Texoma and stop the movement of these zebra mussels."
But we're about to do just the opposite. Instead of locking up Texoma, we're going to open the spigot and let 'er spill.
The Tulsa District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which controls Texoma, informed me last Friday they were about to grant permission to the North Texas Municipal Water District (NTMWD) to begin pumping drinking water from Texoma for the first time since pumping stopped in August 2009 to prevent the spread of the mussels.
This action awards us with some dubious firsts. We are about to become the first people in the world to pump massive volumes of drinking water from a body of water known to be infested with these life-strangling mussels. We also are about to become the first people in the world to rely on a system of containment that is much cheaper and simpler than methods in use elsewhere. Our system is untested anywhere else.
Texoma is an 89,000-acre manmade reservoir 70 miles north of Dallas at the Texas-Oklahoma border. The water pumped from Texoma will flow into a creek that flows into Lake Lavon, a 21,000-acre reservoir in Collin County between Plano and Farmersville, owned and operated by the Fort Worth District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The pumping will be done by the NTMWD, which sells water to suburbs north of Dallas.
It's not that there is no plan to contain the mussels. There is. Andy Commer, the regulatory director for the Tulsa district of the corps, told me the corps was granting permission to pump only after consulting with scientists and engaging in a long process of talks with NTMWD, which devised the original pumping and containment plan.
So we must hope he's right, and the scientists are right and the NTMWD is right. Otherwise we will spew zebra mussels into the entire ecosystem of the region and state.
That's what stops the critics dead in their tracks — the sheer size of the risk. No matter how bad our drought, no matter how much we think we need that water, the risk of putting a bullet in the head of every lake and river in the state is more than some experts on the issue can even fathom.
Jeff Alexander, a Michigan journalist with an award-winning book on the topic, says he can't understand how one reservoir full of water, even a big one, possibly could be worth such a terrifying roll of the dice.
"I would be skeptical that you could pump water from a reservoir that is already infested with zebra mussels into one that is not and not infect the other reservoir," Alexander says. "To me that just seems like Russian roulette at the highest levels."
Zebra mussels spread through a body of water in a phase of their life cycle when they are of microscopic size, like spores, free-floating at all depths and numbering in the billions. They pick up calcium and grow shells as they float, eventually becoming heavy enough to sink. If they hit the right kind of surface when they sink, they grow in huge numbers and begin powerfully sucking in microscopic food sources, devouring so much life that they starve out all the other species at their level of the food chain.
