Posted: Thu, 18 Feb 2016 08:22 PM - 36,628 Readers

By: Fred Cantu

The weather has been so nice a lot of people are surprised to learn the drought is back. For the first time in 11 weeks moderate drought has returned to The Lone Star State

At least we're starting off this drought in a better place. After all of last year's rain the Lower Colorado River Authority reports Lake Travis right now is just three feet shy of being 100 percent full. John Hofmann, executive VP for water at the LCRA says, "If you compare us to where we were at this time last year we're net a million acre feet more supply than we had then and over 50 feet more water in Lake Travis."

But the latest U.S. Drought Monitor report reminds us those rainy days are ancient history. Last week just 12 percent of Texas was considered abnormally dry. This week that jumped up to 45 percent with the worst of it right on top of us. KEYE TV Chief Meteorologist Chikage Windler says she wasn't at all surprised. She explains, "Last week we saw the conditions deteriorate enough that the Central Texas area was in abnormally dry conditions. This week it's deteriorated even more because we haven't had a single drop of rain since then. And now many areas including Travis, Williamson and out to the Hill Country are considered in a moderate drought again."

The LCRA says it didn't let its guard down after the drought-busting rains and always considers the roller coaster ride that is Central Texas weather. Hofmann says, "We don't want to lose the lessons that we learned during the course of the last several dry years to remind us that we live at the edge of a very arid part of the world. And just as we have times when there's extreme flooding that we're subject to there's also times where we have periods of drought."

The LCRA says Lake Travis is now so full that one serious rainstorm could overflow the lake and we could go from talking about a drought to talking about flooding again. How crazy is that?

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