Watching the Water Table Drop
Years before serving on the Authority’s Board of Directors, Larry Weppler saw firsthand what excessive groundwater pumping could do. He shares how falling water levels and land subsidence reinforced the need to transition to surface water.
Transcript
Transcript edited for clarity and readability.
From working with land development and water plants for MUDs, over time we would have to go back and lower pumps in water wells because the water table was dropping.
When the water table drops, at some point you’re going to have subsidence.
You realize then that you couldn’t have what was happening down at the Port of Houston and in Baytown, where they lost a lot of land.
I had a job one time to survey what they called the Texas White House in Baytown.
I found one of the rear property corners, and it was about 100 feet out in the bay.
That was the original property corner. That’s how much the land had gone down over the years. The water was only about two and a half feet deep, but it was still way out there.
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