Last year we had drought conditions around the Austin area with Lake Travis being 40 feet below it's full levels at around 640 feet above sea level. This year though we have had some incredible storms over the past weeks and in late May that have turned this around to serious issues of flooding. In fact last night it rained so hard in the Hill Country around Austin that Lake Travis rose by almost 11 feet as you can see in this graph.
http://www.lcra.org/docs/floodstatus.html
| Lake LBJ at 1431 Bridge | 9.53 | |
| Honey Creek near Kingsland | 10.40 | |
| Backbone Creek at Marble Falls | 12.91 | |
| Burnet 6 SSE | 12.33 | |
| Hamilton Creek near Marble Falls | 15.82 | |
| Marble Falls 6 ENE | 17.39 | |
| Spicewood 5 WNW | 9.99 |
http://www.lcra.org/water/XML_rainfall.html?type=print
It is sometimes hard to grasp just how significant that amount of rainfull means since we usually only see it our own area or backyard. To put this in perspective we had some storms back around May 24-28 that produced 8-12 inches or rain during that time which amounted to an additional 88 billion gallons of water added to the lakes. In all the rains in late May created 286 billion gallons of water. Now you take 12 to 19 inch rainfails and just imagine how many billions of gallons of water that will equate to.
