Luce Bayou Project

From the Houston Chronicle:

After decades of fits and starts, Houston is pushing forward with plans to move Trinity River water nearly 30 miles to Lake Houston. The lake, located on the  San Jacinto River, is the primary water source for millions of people in the region.

Planners say the Luce Bayou project, a nearly $300 million pipeline and canal, would provide water to the ever-swelling city and suburbs while helping with the area's planned conversion from groundwater. The newly adopted state water plan identifies it among the key strategies to slake the region's thirst in 2060.

The Luce Bayou project has been a dream of water planners for decades. A task force first identified the meandering stream as a way to provide Trinity water to Houston in the 1930s.

Two decades later, the city obtained a permit that allows the transfer of up to 940,000 acre-feet of water from the Trinity to the San Jacinto River basin each year. One-acre foot, equal to about 326,000 gallons, is enough to serve two typical Texas families for a year.

In the 1960s, Houston built a pumping station and canal system to send a portion of the water to purification plants on the east and southeast sides of the city. Still, the city never has fully utilized its rights to Trinity water.

Luce Bayou resurfaced as an option for moving more water westward in the early 1980s, but the project stalled in part because of a sagging economy.

Since then, the proposal has changed significantly, with the Trinity water no longer flowing through the natural channel to reach Lake Houston. The surge of new water would have caused flooding and wiped out natural features along the path of the stream, said Donald Ripley, executive director of the Coastal Water Authority, a quasi-governmental body that is developing the project for the city of Houston.

"It is clear that plan was not environmentally sensitive," Ripley said. "If we had asked for a permit on that application today, it would have been dead on arrival."

Now, from a proposed pumping station on the Trinity, just north of the Liberty County town of Dayton, the water would flow about four miles by pipeline to a settling basin. From there, it would travel 24 miles under gravity by a high-banked, earthen canal to Lake Houston.

The proposed project would harm 200 acres of protected wetlands, mostly bottomland hardwood forest. To offset the damage, the water authority has purchased a nearby 3,000-acre tract for the Trinity River National Wildlife Refuge.

As primary steward of the nation's wetlands, the Army Corps of Engineers is studying the project's potential environmental impacts. A draft analysis should be complete in early 2012, said Sandra Arnold, a Corps spokeswoman.

If the project meets the Corps' requirements, the federal agency would grant a wetlands permit, which often is the most significant obstacle to building. The Coastal Water Authority's Ripley said the pipeline and canal are on a schedule to be completed by 2020.

Luce Bayou would deliver up to 450,000 acre-feet of water a year. The city of Houston already has agreements to sell some of the new supply to water districts in north and west Harris County and Fort Bend County.