BIG SPRING, Texas — For the next five years, the City of Big Spring has a water conservation plan in place if the city ever has to start rationing water.
It's a plan that's required by the TCEQ.
"It’s just in place in case something drastic does happen," said Shane Bowles, Public Works Director.
Every five years the plan is reworked and improved.
"So really what we’re doing is tweaking it, going through it, making sure it makes sense, see if anything has changed in our system in those five years," said Bowles.
If the plan needs to be enacted, he says the city will first start with irrigation.
"Normally when they first start rationing water it would begin with irrigation. You'll hear you can only water your grass once a week or only on Thursdays. So that’s typically how it starts that way, we start rationing water. Hopefully it doesn’t get more severe than that but those plans are set in in case we need to," Bowles said.
As for if and when this plan would need to be used, if West Texas continues to not see much rainfall then the plan could be called into action.
"We’re not getting as much rainfall as we want and those levels are dropping and if keep dropping having this drought and they keep dropping then there may be a time where those are placed into effect for contingencies on drought conservation," said Bowles.
However, he says there's nothing to be worried about at this time. Because of the water district the city is in, there are more than enough sources of water.
"Luckily with our water district there’s three different lakes we can pull off of for water sources, so if it does get to a point where one lake loses water we can pull from two others," Bowles said. "We even have emergency wells if those go dry. But we’ve never had that situation before."