This has been the season of extremes in Texas — too much fire and too little water. As towns and cities throughout the state have been coping with the extreme drought, dozens of wildfires that erupted over the Labor Day weekend continued to burn on Tuesday, destroying hundreds of homes and forcing thousands of people to evacuate.

Image Llano has some of the toughest water restrictions in Texas. Credit... The New York Times

To ease the drought-related strain on Llano’s water system, Bryan Miiller, the owner of a meat-processing company, cut back his production schedule to four days a week from five, reducing the water he uses to clean the equipment and work areas, though he was not required to do so under the restrictions. Restaurants are serving water only if a patron requests it, and a few residents and businesses, including local car washes, have gone through the trouble and expense of trucking in water from outside the city or from private wells. Terry Mikulenka, manager of the city-owned 18-hole golf course, has been spraying treated sewer water on the greens. One couple has been irrigating their backyard trees and shrubs with the run-off from their washing machine and the water they use to wash their dishes and take a shower, a conservation technique numerous other residents are doing as well.

“I think all of us are making sacrifices,” said the city manager, Finley deGraffenried. “People are changing their ways, changing their habits.”

In many ways, the drought that has devastated Texas has been measured on an epic scale. It is the worst one-year drought in recorded state history, costing Texas’ farmers and ranchers an estimated $5.2 billion. But the drought has also had a smaller, more intimate effect on how many Texans live and work. In Houston, the biggest city, the mayor recently ordered residents to limit the watering of their lawns to twice a week. The seaside city of Galveston banned all outdoor watering for five days in August but then eased the rules to allow twice-a-week watering.

In Llano, a town of 3,100 about a 90-minute drive northwest of Austin in the Hill Country, the river from which the town gets 100 percent of its water supply has been running at critically low levels. One recent afternoon, the Llano River was flowing at 2.3 to 3.4 cubic feet per second, down from 123 cubic feet per second, the median level for that date.