Lake Levels Up Slightly After Rainfall

Recent rainfall is helping to fill the Highland Lakes—at least a little bit.

Parts of Central Texas received more than two inches of rain on Sunday. Combined with rainfall from earlier last week, rainfall totals for some areas topped nine inches.

The Lower Colorado River Authority says the water level of Lake Travis is up a little over a foot. Lake Buchanan only saw a gain of a few hundredths of an inch.

"The location of the rain makes all the difference and, in this case, the vast majority of the rain fell over the Highland Lakes basin," LCRA river operations center supervisor Dan Yates says.

But the lakes still have a long way to go— they are just 44 percent full. Lake Travis is about 30 feet below average. Lake Buchanan is about 17 feet low.

Yates says it would take one huge storm to fill up the lakes in just one day.

“That’s not totally out of the question, I mean if you look back to the storm that hit in 2007, in Marble Falls, Texas, there was a 19 inch rainfall overnight and it continued to rain for the next couple of days after that and it also was a widespread storm," Yates says. "But that was one storm that gave us almost a million acre feet in runoff. So it can happen in a day but it can also take a season.”