Despite above-normal rainfall in the Texas Hill County in March, lakes Travis and Buchanan remain stubbornly low.

The combined storage of the lakes, the chief reservoirs of Central Texas, remains 37 percent of capacity, despite a roughly four percent increase in the amount of water in the lakes between March 1 and April 1. (That’s a rise from 717,053 acre-feet on March 1 to 749,364 on April 1, according to the Lower Colorado River Authority, which oversees the lakes. An acre-foot of water is roughly equal to the amount of water four average Austin households consume annually.)LCRA braces for summer-months drought

And lake levels have nudged up only slightly: Lake Travis by about two feet since mid-March, Lake Buchanan by about a foot.

The reason is that despite above-average rainfall, the amount of water flowing into the lakes from Hill Country tributaries, anemic from a long starvation of water, remained low. March inflows were 19,136 acre-feet – about 21 percent of the March average. Inflows have been below average every month for 36 straight months.