Weathering Texas’s Winter Storm at the San Jacinto River Authority

Weathering Texas’s Winter Storm at the San Jacinto River Authority

SJRA employees deice water supply structures during the February storm.

The San Jacinto River Authority (SJRA) provides a range of raw water, drinking water, wastewater, and flood mitigation services to the region around Houston, Texas. During this February’s winter storm in Texas, the SJRA fared well: its backup generators, emergency readiness plans, and large inventory of replacement equipment allowed it to provide uninterrupted service to its customers and even to aid other agencies and facilities with drinking water. In this interview, SJRA General Manager Jace Houston and Operations Manager Jason Williams tell Municipal Water Leader about the agency and the reasons why it successfully weathered the storm.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Jace Houston: My undergraduate degree is in civil engineering, and I went to law school after that. I’m an attorney by trade and have been working in Texas my entire career. I worked at the state capitol, where I was exposed to legislative policy work. In 1997, I ended up in the water business. In Texas, groundwater is managed completely separately from surface water. I worked on the groundwater side of our water universe for the first 10 years of my water career as general counsel for the Harris Galveston Subsidence District (HGSD). In 2007, a management position opened at the SJRA, which is on the surface water side of Texas water, and I switched to a management, leadership, and water policymaking position. I started as the deputy general manager in 2007, and in 2012, our previous general manager retired, and the board promoted me to his position.

Jason Williams: I started my career in water and wastewater infrastructure repair and replacement in Cleveland, Texas, in 1996 after I graduated from high school. In 1998, I began my operations career with the SJRA’s Woodlands division. I was promoted to the position of operations and maintenance manager for the SJRA Woodlands division in 2016 and to utility enterprise operations manager in 2020.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the SJRA.

Jace Houston: There are probably a dozen river authorities in Texas. These are governmental entities created by our legislature in the first part of the 20th century to develop the water resources within certain river basins. River authorities cover large geographic areas—the SJRA is one of the smaller ones, because our river basin happens to be pretty small. Some of the river authorities cover over 70 counties.

The core purpose of river authorities is to look 50–100 years into the future and determine how much water will be needed to meet future needs, whether industrial, municipal, agricultural, or mining related. If we determine that we don’t have enough water to meet those needs, then we identify the projects we will need to implement in order to secure it.

River authorities’ enabling statutes have long lists of different activities that we can undertake. However, we have to have customers who are willing to pay us to do those activities, because only one of the river authorities in Texas has tax authority. The rest of us have no ability to charge an ad valorem tax or property tax of any sort. We have to enter into contracts with customers to either sell them a product, such as water, or to provide a service for them, such as treating wastewater. Because of that, river authorities typically evolve to meet the needs of the customers in their basins.

The SJRA was created in 1937, so we’ve been around for over 75 years. We have five operating divisions. Our Highlands division is a raw water sales division that maintains infrastructure, pump stations, and canals to deliver and sell raw water to customers, most of whom are industrial. The Lake Conroe division built, operates, and maintains Lake Conroe, a water supply reservoir out of which a number of municipal and industrial customers purchase water. Our Woodlands division provides wholesale water and wastewater services to the 10 municipal utility districts (MUDs) that serve the community of The Woodlands, Texas, which has about 120,000 residents. Those 10 utility districts entered into contracts with us to build their regional wastewater treatment plants; to install their water wells, water towers, and water plants; and to be their wholesale water and wastewater provider. Our groundwater reduction plan division built a surface water treatment plant at Lake Conroe to treat water to drinking water standards and deliver it to customers within Montgomery County. Our final operating division is our flood management division. It was created in 2018 after Hurricane Harvey. We were directed by the governor of Texas to come up with flood mitigation projects and to work with local partners to find customers to pay to build those projects.

Municipal Water Leader: How large is your service area, and how many customers do you have?

Jace Houston: Our Woodlands division has 10 MUDs that are technically its customers, but it serves about 120,000 residents and businesses. We have 18–20 raw water customers, including power plants and the second-largest refinery in the country, ExxonMobil’s Baytown refinery. Our surface water treatment plant at Lake Conroe has 80 customers, 7 of which receive treated surface water from the plant. Those include the City of Conroe, The Woodlands, a number of MUDs, and a private co-op water utility. The seven large utilities that physically receive the surface water from the surface water treatment plant represent about 250,000 residential and commercial customers.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your experience during February winter storm and the effects that you saw on your infrastructure and services.

Jace Houston: An event like this affects each of our divisions a little differently. The surface water treatment plant is brand new, and most of its facilities were built from day 1 to be weather resistant. In the Houston region, our biggest threat is not ice storms; it’s hurricanes. We planned our systems to face prolonged power outages primarily because of hurricanes. That preparation is what got us through the ice storm.

There were also problems with freezing pipes and equipment. One of the largest threats was that with the power out, we couldn’t keep things turned on and pumping to keep water moving and prevent freezing. We were able to mitigate that risk because, for years, we’ve made capital investments in backup power. Our surface water treatment plant, our three wastewater treatment plants in The Woodlands, and most of our water plants in The Woodlands have built-in backup power, including natural gas generators and diesel generators, and some of our lift stations and remote operations have mobile generators.

To make those capital investments, you need to convince your customers to pay the rates necessary to afford them. Fortunately, our customers recognize the threat of hurricanes. Our region was without power for more than 10 days during Hurricane Ike in 2008. During a prolonged power outage, it’s bad enough not to be able run air conditioners, but being without drinking water would be worse. Because of that, our customers were willing to make those investments.

We had a plan in place for employees to be on duty for 24 hours once the storm began. We kept our employees housed on site when necessary so that they could take generators from location to location to keep systems operational.

Regarding the danger of freezing, a lot of our critical systems are within structures, and a lot of our exposed systems are large in diameter. The systems that are exposed to freezing temperatures are not 2‐inch PVC lines coming up the outside of a house; they are heavier-duty, larger-diameter pipes. We kept the water flowing and were able to avoid any major freezing problems. Where smaller pipes and valves did freeze, we had inventory on hand to replace things quickly.

Municipal Water Leader: How long were you without your normal power generation?

Jason Williams: In The Woodlands, we experienced 50 percent drops in power for periods of 4–6 hours in one location and then in another. I don’t recall any time when we were completely in the dark in The Woodlands. We always had one or two facilities with online power and the other three or four on generator power. We had to make sure that the ones that were using online power were reset, ready to go, and running as they should be. The ones that were generating power were doing the best they could to keep up with demand to keep the water flowing and things running to avoid freezing issues. I think the longest we were out in Lake Conroe was 10–12 hours. We would get power back for a couple of hours and then lose it again.

Jace Houston: The result was that our Woodlands utility never went down. Our customers never saw a loss of service, and we didn’t have to issue boil water notices. The surface water plant stayed operational throughout.

I got a call in the middle of the ice storm from our county office of emergency management asking whether we had a tap at the surface water treatment plant that could be used to fill up a truck. I made some calls and confirmed that we had the means to fill a truck at our surface water treatment plant. As soon as we confirmed that, the county office of emergency management put us on a state list of suppliers of potable water, and before we knew it, we had tanker trucks lined up at our gate to be filled with treated water to deliver all over the state, including to critical facilities like hospitals and dialysis centers. Some nearby utilities had their power back but still had boil water notices, so they were appreciative of the potable water we provided. We were filling trucks at the plant for several days.

Municipal Water Leader: To what extent did you see unusual changes in demand for your services?

Jace Houston: I remember our utility teams telling us that we were at summer demand levels. That was caused by a combination of broken pipes and people dripping or running faucets in order to keep pipes in their homes from freezing.

Jason Williams: During the first day or two of the freeze, demand was relatively low, but as soon as thawing started, we were at peak summertime usage. We were delivering more than 30 million gallons per day for about 2 days before it started to taper off. We were way above average for roughly 4 days.

Municipal Water Leader: What other emergency planning processes helped the agency respond to the storm?

Jace Houston: For one, we had an inventory of parts we knew we were going to need in an emergency. When the roads are frozen over, you can’t get in the truck and drive to the parts store and get what you need. Making the investment of time and money to have things on hand was a big deal. Also, we put a lot of emphasis on ongoing inspection and maintenance.

Jason Williams: The most important thing is that we had prepared for long power outages due to hurricanes. We learned a lot during Hurricane Ike, and we’ve been preparing for the next Ike for many years now. You’re warned of a weather event roughly a week out, and at that point you start looking at your chemical and fuel stores and getting chemicals while you still have time. Most people don’t start to prep until 3 days out. We try to get ahead of the game. If the event misses us, that’s good; if it doesn’t, we’re prepared. We stock our offices with food for operators in case they can’t get home or have to be here for 24‐hour operations. We try to have comfortable facilities to sleep in, with bedding and cots.

Municipal Water Leader: What changes, if any, will you make to prepare for potential similar events in the future?

Jace Houston: One of the things we’ve talked about is mutual aid agreements. We were sending water out in this event. This was a statewide emergency, so there weren’t a lot of entities in a position to provide aid. Normally, our emergencies are regional, like a hurricane or wildfire. We have standing agreements with emergency service providers for things like pumps, pipes, and equipment, and we have mutual aid agreements with other water agencies in the state of Texas for equipment, including backhoes, bulldozers, dump trucks, and pumps. A lot of us have registered equipment in an inventory so that we can talk to each other and get what we need in a hurry. It will be a point of emphasis to improve and expand that system.

Jason Williams: We have to be prepared for everything. Being prepared for hurricanes helped us a ton. We also need to plan for extreme cold weather events, such as the February storm. We need to beef up our cold weather gear for our employees in the field. We do have cold weather gear, but not for 8ºF at midnight.

Jace Houston is the general manager of the San Jacinto River Authority. He can be contacted at jhouston@sjra.net.

Jason Williams is the operations manager of the San Jacinto River Authority. He can be contacted at jwilliams@sjra.net.