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Lake Travis Dried Up In Jonestown
Posted: Fri, 2 Aug 2013 08:05 AM - 18,272 Readers
By: KEYE TV
The Hill Country city of Jonestown has one main attraction: Jones Brothers Park on the North
Shore of Lake Travis. It used to be a popular destination for boating, fishing and swimming, but that was before the drought. The park has the
only public boat launches on the North Shore, and they've been out of
commission for two and a half years.
The once busy park is almost desolate now. A sign warning swimmers of
no lifeguard at the beach is the least of the worries there, because
there's no water.
Lifelong resident and City of Jonestown Parks and Recreation worker Karl
Babyak says this part of Lake Travis is usually full. Having it empty
is sucking the lifeblood of Jonestown dry.
Babyak says, "Ninety-nine-point five percent of all our revenue has gone
away." He says boat launch fees made the city a lot of money in the
past, but now he only gets an occasional pavilion rental at the park.
Walking from one of the three boat ramps to where Lake Travis used to
flow, is walking on dry and parched earth. Even a small creek that
usually flows has run dry. You can walk for a quarter of a mile and
still not see water from any of what used to be shoreline at the park.
What you do see is stairs leading to nowhere and land-locked docks in an
area where 25 feet of water should be. To even get a boat in, you'd
have to go a dozen miles down the road, and launch off the rocks.
David Watson bought his lakefront home in Jonestown more than 10 years
ago.
"I'm just a water person. I have jet skis and boats and things like
that, and now they sit in my yard instead of on the dock where they
should be," Watson says.
He has a picture of what the view from his home used to look like, when
the lake was full. Rows of boats used to line the Easy Street Marina
next door to his house. Now, the marina is belly-up.
Watson says, "It's very depressing. A lot of people pay good money to
be out here at the lake and have waterfront property, and you can't even
see water from where we are."
If you look down the cliffs you can see some pools of water that are cut
off and not even deep enough for boat owners to pull their boats out.
To rebound here in Jonestown, the water would have to rise more than 20
feet. The lowest boat ramp at Jones Brothers Park can barely open if
Lake Travis reaches 645 feet. It is 624 feet right now.
"It's gonna take a hurricane to be able to fill on up again," Karl
Babyak says.
Ironically, a flash flood last September hit Jonestown hard. It
destroyed many of the docks and devastated the now-closed marina.
Despite that flood, folks in Jonestown say they've never seen it this
dry and the water this low on their section of Lake Travis.
By Chikage Windler
[edit]
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