Did you Spot the weird dip in the usage chart?

If you follow our city's daily water usage, you may have noticed the strange dip in our daily usage chart. You ALSO may have noticed that we beat the all time high water usage for the year, by 1.9 million gallons!

First, why the dip?

Our water system can produce up to 50 million gallons a day! But similarly to topping out the speed of your car, it's not a good idea to make a habit out of pushing to the limits. In the summer, we stress the system with extra water demand, which can mostly be attributed to extra irrigation usage, for the purpose of keeping grass green that naturally wants to go dormant during the heat. Now imagine you have a flat tire, you have to drive below the speed limit, and your car may only top out at 35 mph.

Similarly to the car, under extra summer stress for irrigation, parts become vulnerable, and yesterday one of those parts went out, and took our ability to produce from 50 million gallons per day (MGD) down to 45 MGD. The 3 lines across the top of the chart correspond to our TCEQ regulated thresholds for drought triggers. At 85%, 90%, and 95% of the system usage, we enter into different stages of drought. Normally that means 42.5 MGD, 45 MGD and 47.5 MGD. When we have a reduced treatment capacity, the 3 different percentiles become lower, in this case we could produce 45 MDG, so our triggers became 38.25 MGD, 40.5 MGD and 42.75 MGD.

It just so happened that while we were in reduced capacity, we say our highest demand yet. Luckily we were still 2 million gallons shy of Stage 1 Drought Triggers.