LAKEHILLS, Texas – Delivering water isn’t David Cahill’s main job, but it’s one that needs doing.
Cahill says that as water levels fall at Medina Lake, nearby wells are also drying up. Now, he’s delivering 1,000 gallons of water at a time, in tanks towed behind his truck, to neighbors in similar situations.
“It hurt to hire somebody to bring me water,” said Cahill, whose wells at his three properties started drying up this spring. “So I decided to just try and help the people in our community.”
Cahill, said he charges about $125 to $150 per trip for people in the lake area, and more for others farther away, but he tries to keep the charges low.
The “slim profit” he makes goes toward paying off the new, deeper well he had to have dug for more than $28,000.
“I don’t like people hurting. And so I want to help them if I can. If I didn’t have — if I had all the money I needed, I’d be delivering water to people for free,” he said.
As of Tuesday, Medina Lake, a reservoir created for irrigation purposes, was just 6.3 percent full. Waterfront homes towered over the receding water line, and the dried lake bed stretching out behind Cahill’s home appeared more akin to a sandbox.
A home re-modeler by trade, Cahill can’t say if the level of the reservoir is causing lower groundwater levels, too, “but I can definitely say when the lake goes down, wells start drying up. There’s — that’s definite.”
Doug Schnoeblen, the South Texas Branch chief for U.S. Geological Survey’s Oklahoma-Texas Water Science Center, told KSAT that they don’t have data to show a direct cause-and-effect at this point.
“You know I’m sympathetic to the problem there, but it may be from other reasons than the lake level dropping. We just don’t know,” Schnoeblen said, while also adding that the possibility couldn’t be ruled out either.
Other possibilities, he said, could include the complexity of the geology in the area, aquifer levels dropping, or drought conditions.
Whether the reason, there are still plenty of people depending on Cahill for their water delivery. But there are only so many hours in a day to make them.
“We can only deliver 4 to 5 loads each day depending on the route,” Cahill said.