I would like to see the impact bottled water has on our lakes. Think about how many bottles of Dasani are in Texas alone, and a whole bunch of them are bottled with Dallas municipal water.

Probably not measurable.

Tyler is full....

DFW is about to get much much bigger. With Toyota, State Farm, Kohls, and Amazon coming to town, that alone will add close to 10,000 people next year alone and thats just the tip of the iceberg. DFW is projected to be over 20mm in population by 2020 � 5 years from now. Where do you think that water is going to come from? Yep, east of here.

I don't know what is causing the drought; but I do think we all need to rethink our consumption including big businesses.

All we need to fill the lakes up again is a Hurricane or a couple good tropical storms.

On vertical wells you are correct. However on horizontal wells it is common to frac multiple zones and use 3-5+ million gallons of water.

You are wrong about west texas and no population boom. Midland/ Odessa has almost tripled in population in the past 10 years, Abilene is almost 50% larger! San Angelo is over 30%.
I can you for sure that the drought is the problem. When a creek goes dry the creek bed then goes dry. The creek beds in west texas are dryer then they have ever been. Before the creeks can run for any amount of time the water is drawn into the beds. Until they are saturated runoff will not stay constant. Also when a lake has hundreds if not thousands of exposed dry acres that dry land has to saturate before the lake rises and stays up any. Unless we have a huge flood the creeks will continue to suck up these 4 and 5 inch rains.

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Interesting question so I looked. If you use simple averaging which is on the low side since more water is drank here than in cooler climates this is what I got.
There are 50 billon bottles sold in the US each year, about 400 bottles per person. There are 27 million people in texas so that works out to 5.4 billions bottles a year in texas. So that works out to appx 6.4 billion gallons of water.
That's a lot folks.

About 1 foot of depth on a lake that has 20,000 surface acres for all of the bottled water in Texas. Not much.

A little bit here for commercial use, a little bit there for the oil industry, a little bit to keep the lawns green for the Home Owner Associations, etc., etc., etc.

You wake up and find that all those little bits have the area lake levels low since the ongoing drought has not allowed Nature to refill the lakes.

And every proponent of those little bits arguing that their use of the water is not at fault, blame it all on Nature for allowing a drought to exist.

This makes sense, since Nature does not have a proponent to argue the case that it's greed of men that is causing the problem. And who could also argue that the drought may also have been caused by the greed of men during this industrial age.

I believe that the reasons for our low water levels are several. Fracturing, population boom, water bottles, lack of rain, water rights going to certain cities, people watering their yards too much, etc. are all contributing to this. Bottom line is these conditions aren't going anywhere anytime soon so we all need to adapt to the new conditions we have. With this year being an el Nino year and not being very productive heavy rain wise, I truly think the only thing that will bring us the water we need is either a hurricane or tropical storm. I also believe that we as fisherman need to draw attention to these issues in order for our kids and our kids kids to be able to enjoy these lakes as we do/did at one time. This is something that is going to need to have attention on it either now or when it's too late. I remember that my weather professor told me that the west texas desert is expanding and that in the next 10 to 20 years we will be considered a desert. Who knows if he's right but it sure seems like that is the path we are heading towards.

The amount of water on Earth is always the same. It's a closed system. If it isn't in your area it is somewhere else. It is continually recycling through the atmosphere.

Earth's waters are continually in motion in a process known as the hydrologic cycle. The process consists of water entering the atmosphere through either evaporation or transpiration and returning to the Earth's surface through condensation and precipitation. The same water throughout history has been transferred from the oceans into Earth's atmosphere and then dropped upon land where it eventually moves back to the seas. It evaporates from oceans, streams, lakes, rivers and other forms of surface water and rises into the sky as water vapor.

Water vapor comes together in the form of precipitation which then falls to the Earth. About 70 percent of this water evaporates back into the atmosphere. The water that doesn't evaporate remains on the surface and runs off into ponds, lakes and rivers or seeps into the soil to become groundwater.
The sun supplies the energy to keep the water moving from the Earth to the atmosphere and back to Earth. At any given time, about five gallons of every 100,000 gallons of water on Earth is in motion. Viewed as a cycle of nature, this process has neither a beginning nor an end. No water is actually gained or lost, but the amount of water available to any user may fluctuate and changes in water quality.

Now that's an answer.Thanks learned something today.Darrell

Have the lake levels dropped more in the past 3 years (2011-2014) or the 3 years prior to that (2008-2011)?

Unfortunately lake levels will drop much more in the future during periods of drought than they do today. Almost all of the water in Texas lakes is committed to users who today only use a small fraction of the water they have purchased for long time use. Most cities have enough water to take care of their needs for another 50 years including their anticipated growth. Most are probably using only a small fraction of that now so as they grow and use more water, the lakes will fluctuate more.

Most lake managers sell or plan on the amount of water that will be available during the drought of record for the watershed of the lake. In theory, if we had another drought of record, and everyone used the water they had a commitment for, the lake would go dry the day it began to rain again. But if the drought is worse than the drought of record, we would be out of water if everyone used the amount of water they were entitled.

Most of the lakes spill water when we are in periods of high rainfall and actually the amount captured is a small portion of the water that passes through. Unfortunately, few good reservoir sites are available for development.

Not much encourages conservation other than cost. Future water supplies will be much more costly than the present cost which I suppose could cause most to rethink their landscaping and industrial use of water. I suppose it could eventually affect the location that people chose to live and the location of industries, but it hasn't so far.