Lake Casa Blanca: the poster child for development run amuck

By María Eugenia Guerra

Sometimes good news is longwinded. Bear with me: A bit of the best environmental news I've heard lately was that Senator Judith Zaffirini at the close of the last legislative session issued a directive (in Rider 32 of the Texas Parks and Wildlife part of the state budget) for TPW to apply to the Department of the Interior for a feasibility study for the dredging of Lake Casa Blanca. Should TPW snag the $900,000 in federal funds, Webb County will match $300,000.
The news came to me in a recent interview with Precinct 2 Commissioner Judith Gutierrez in whose precinct the lake and its watershed fall.
I'm not a fan of dredging, and so I'm not sold entirely on the idea, but I'm all for a study of what ails Lake Casa Blanca and what needs to be done to revitalize and re-claim this jewel of a recreational resource. I'm elated that the environmental welfare of this beautiful body of water, this bird watching paradise is on the radar screen of Senator Zaffirini and Commissioner Judith Gutierrez.
Incredibly, dredging probably seems like the path of least resistance to regain some of the depth of a lake once 54 feet deep in some places (now 14 to 17 feet in depth in those same spots).
Before I would undertake a dredging project, which has the propensity to stir up 50 years of settled toxins, I would look at the watershed to determine what land disturbance and runoff spots had been so mightily at play to displace that much water with silt and sand.
From 4,000 feet in the air it looks like a no-brainer -- the filling of the lake with silt has come from the wholesale destruction of native foliage and the destabilization of land for agriculture and for development. Land clearing for the bed of Loop 20, land clearing for warehouses, for subdivisions right up to the water's edge, for the airport, for a hockey arena, for roads. You'll find no argument here that a city wants and needs those amenities and better road infrastructure, but isn't there a more earth-friendly way to clear land so that it doesn't end up in the only public recreational water resource between here and the Falcon Reservoir?
That shallow baby-sized bio-retention pond at the edge of the 200 denuded acres of Lakeside Subdivision, does that really put the developer into compliance with federal stormwater law adopted into city ordinance? From the air, the stripped, undeveloped raw land looks like a chute to facilitate in a heavy rain the movement of mud and silt straight into the lake.
"Siltation is a natural process for bodies of water," said biologist Dr. Jim Earhart, director of the Río Grande International Study Center (RGISC), "but rapid development around the lake has really sped up the process, and not just immediately around the lake. Look at development on both sides of the loop from the lake to the University. You can't displace that much foliage and you can't plan this poorly without having some problems. Huge tracts of land are cleared all at once when the actual building activity takes place only in one smaller area. How much would it have cost to have left the native vegetation?" he asked, adding, "Probably much less than it will cost to dredge the lake."
I asked Riazul Mia, director of the City of Laredo's Environmental Services Department why the City allowed contractors to disturb great expanses of soil all at once and not in phases. He said that developers tend to plat, record, and permit only the small area they intend to develop first and leave the larger part of the property as agricultural land. "Agricultural land does not face the same compliance guidelines. They can pretty much do what they want on agricultural land except dam, divert, or impede the flow of a creek, which is a violation of state water code," Mia said. "It may be time that we look at an ordinance for construction that allows soil disturbance only as great as the footprint of the building, like they do in Arizona," he added.
"Local developers argue that they must clear the land with a bulldozer, destroying all vegetation and channeling the creeks because most people in Laredo cannot afford to pay the additional cost incurred when streams are left intact and native vegetation is conserved," Earhart said, adding, "Well, whose taxes are going to pay for lake dredging?"
"In March of last year, the deepest place we could find at Lake Casa Blanca was 12 feet," said Texas A&M International University biology professor Dr. Tom Vaughan, co-director of RGISC. "It has to be said that some of the agricultural practices on the watershed are also part of the siltation and erosion problems. Root plowing, grazing and overgrazing, and soil conditions during prolonged drought disturb the stability of the soil. The pads that are cleared for gas wells, the roads that go to gas wells and criss-cross the ranchlands, these become channels to the nearest body of water, in this case Lake Casa Blanca.
"When you create a new road or grade an old one, you are destablizing soil. Factor in all the stripping of land for development for subdivisions, warehouses, the airport, Loop 20, new roads and you've got a fairly quick answer for what practices led to the rapid siltation of Lake Casa Blanca," he said.
"The surface to volume ratio of the lake has greatly increased, decreasing the time for evaporation to empty the lake of its contents," Earhart said. "The lake is now much less efficient at storing water than when it was first constructed. Here is the cold, hard evidence that a businessman dealing with the bottom line can understand," Earhart said. "Here you can begin to put a value on poor soil stewardship. It is no longer the cry of the little old lady in tennis shoes out to save Bambi by keeping the mean old men in bulldozers from leveling the trees on the countryside. Now you are talking about the loss of a body of water that not only supports recreation and business in Laredo, but also could serve as an emergency water source in the case of some major calamity to the river," he emphasized.
According to Mia, an inch of rain adds a foot of water to Lake Casa Blanca. A friend who has a lakehouse on Lake Casa Blanca and a lifetime window of observations about the lake and development told me that after heavy rains earlier this winter he stood on his dock and saw the phenomena of the push of turbid runoff meeting the clearer water of the lake. When he flew over the lake a few days later and as runoff continued draining into the lake, the demarcation, he said, was even more dramatic.
Scant information is available on the construction of Lake Casa Blanca, but what little information exists is in the possession of one of our most reliable scholars, the archivist José Moreno at the Laredo Public Library. The Texas Parks and Wildlife web site reads like the lake was dug yesterday. The Handbook of Texas Online, however, which came to us via Mr. Moreno, tells us that Lake Casa Blanca is at 27° 32' N, 99° 27'W. The first dam was built in 1946 but was damaged by the first floodwaters impounded by piping underneath the earth embankment. A second dam was begun in 1947 and completed in 1951. The lake has a capacity of 20,000 acre feet and a surface area of 1,656 acres at elevation 446.5. Mr. Moreno has a really nice collection of old newspaper clippings that piece together a chronology of efforts that were launched on several occasions through the old Casa Blanca Country Club organization. In 1924, the site for the dam was first selected, though never built. In 1933, the Club went belly-up and the public was given use of the club facility as a municipal club. In 1933 some developers announced plans for Willow Lake, a picnic area replete with gentle horses and burros. In 1939, A.F. Furney Muller and Ted Gutierrez headed up the Webb County Reclamation and Conservation District, the first act of which was to conduct a preliminary investigation into a dam at the Casa Blanca Club. It was believed WPA and state highway funds could be used to build it.
On that recent cold winter morning that we took to the air over the lake and its watershed over 120 square miles of ranchland, we saw it all -- a flock of great white pelicans taking flight, Laredoans busy at a day of fishing by boat and on the banks of the placid lake, families camping near the boat ramps, the great expanse of ranchland creased with roads and marked with high wire lines, stock ponds, and barns. We came in low to follow the Chacon, the creek of my childhood adventures that I used to pick up at Fort Apache on Arkansas and follow deep into the ranchland.
We started on the ranchland above the lake, the stretch between Lake Casa Blanca and Texas A&M International University, and found to our dismay that the water flow in this beautiful, wild stretch of the creek was in places dammed, diverted, and impeded. Roadways had been graded over the creek. Below the lake, the Chacon became a sad, still puddle, one of its banks sporting much like the famous Manadas Creek tire and concrete monument, a hugely grotesque shelf of concrete from years of unfettered illegal dumping of wet cement, an auto junk yard, an inexplicably wide and cleared sandy area on the banks of the Chacon next to a horse raising operation, and the usual rubble of illegal construction dumping.
The City of Laredo shall surely have its work defined when it undertakes the first phases of the remediation and re-claiming of the Chacon as a recreational greenway that winds its way south to the Río Grande.
I hope we are all there to help and to think beyond that canvas to the bigger one of connected greenways that include Lake Casa Blanca, the Lamar Bruni Vergara's Camp Huisache, the grounds at L.I.F.E. which have enormous potential to become parkland, and the Chacon parkway project. That is not my idea; it is Judith Gutierrez'.
And these are not my words, but I felt them all the same and deep in my heart as we flew high enough to see the blue bowl of the lake nestled on the green earth, save for the 200 and 300 acre patches that were missing:

From a distance the world looks blue and green,
From a distance the ocean meets the stream,
and the eagle takes to flight.
From a distance, there is harmony,
and it echoes through the land.
It's the voice of hope, it's the voice of peace,
it's the voice of every one.

Nanci Griffith