Texas Mayor’s Pipe Dream: Refill the Dried-Up Lake

There is no big lake in Big Lake.

It’s not exactly a case of false advertising. There was a big lake here, back in the ‘30s, ‘50s and again in the ‘70s, but it dried up in the intervening years like a puddle in the sun and has been mostly just a dusty, bowl-shaped 1,000-acre expanse since 1977.

At least 10 years ago, some joker planted a sign in the lake bed that asks, “Who pulled the plug on Big Lake?” And it really cracks up the locals when tourists come looking for the big lake in Big Lake.

“It’s kind of a joke in town that people come through and they want to know where the lake is and we send them out there,” said David Werst, editor of the Big Lake Wildcat, a weekly newspaper. “It is funny when they come back and say, ‘You sent me out to a dry lake.’ ”

But the laughs don’t pay Big Lake’s bills. Which is why Mayor J.R. Dunn is proposing to recapture the past and refill the lake by drilling 50 to 100 wells and bringing water to the surface from 650 feet underground.

“We’re not Don Quixote. We’re realists out here,” he said. “We have the largest natural dry lake in the state of Texas, and the state’s second-largest industry is tourism. We feel like if we could take advantage of that, we could develop that and we could create jobs.”

The cost of the whole operation --estimated by the mayor at $2 million--is more than this financially strapped West Texas town of 3,500 can afford.

But the mayor is hoping to get support from the University of Texas, which owns a portion of the dry lake, as well as from private individuals who also own part of the lake bed. The mayor also hopes to get other towns such as Ozona, Sonora, Rankin, Garden City, Midland and Odessa on his bandwagon.

State Sen. Troy Fraser agreed to help Big Lake gather information and look for possible grants and loans. But spokesman Bill Scott said the drought gripping West Texas could make it hard to get state money for the project.

“The state’s priorities have to be on drinking water and irrigation before recreational use,” Scott said.

Big Lake, situated about 215 miles northwest of San Antonio, has a downtown strip that includes a Dairy Queen, City Hall, a fire station, a grocery, an office supply store and a convenience store. Many of the people of Big Lake make their living working in the oil fields.

The hope is that refilling the lake will draw tourists and, in turn, attract hotels, restaurants and stores.

“As a kid I have been fishing in the lake. I’ve water skied on the Big Lake,” Werst recalled, “and people from all over West Texas visited our lake for recreation when the lake had water.”

Big Lake resident William “Chile” Holt, 75, fears the project could be like pouring money down the drain. Big Lake has no natural source or outlet; it is really just one big rain puddle in a part of Texas where the temperatures can climb into the upper 90s, with humidity in single digits.

“The evaporation out here is so bad,” Holt said. “You are looking at least a million gallons a day.”

In the meantime, though, the mayor said: “We are sitting here living in a town called Big Lake, and we don’t have a lake.”