GROESBECK - The trees are turning in Limestone County, painting the rolling landscape in gorgeous reds and yellows that contrast tellingly with the deathly brown of those that have already succumbed to the drought.

But it is the turning of taps, not trees, that is uppermost in the minds of residents of Groesbeck this fall as the city faces the very real possibility it will run out of water by the first week in December if a desperate, last-ditch effort to tap into a new supply fails.

Groesbeck, like virtually the entire state of Texas, is in the grip of a record-setting drought and is one of 11 cities and communities on a state agency list of those most at risk of running out of water in six months if there is no significant rain or they can't shore up their supplies.

Officially, Groesbeck, which has a population of about 6,000, runs out of water on Dec. 6 according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and no one is more aware of that ticking clock than Jackie Levingston, the city's apparently unflappable mayor.

"I go to sleep with water on my mind and I wake up with water on my mind," she said. "I'm very anxious about it."

The city gets its water directly from the Navasota River, which in normal times flows over the spill-way of a reservoir near the town and into a catchment area, where it is sucked into the water treatment plant. That supply is usually supplemented by springs that feed the river below the dam.

But the worst one-year drought in history has significantly slowed the flow of the springs and all but dried up Fort Parker Lake and the river. Without some significant rain or an alternate source of water, the city's ability to siphon what little water is left over the spill-way and into its plant is evaporating.

With time running out, the city council on Wednesday approved an audacious emergency plan that entails pumping water out of the Navasota and using pipes to divert it around Fort Parker Lake and back into the river.

The plan will provide short-term relief to a problem that has been a long time in the making, a breathing space in which Levingston hopes to find a permanent solution.

Not a normal year

Groesbeck's summer began with its water supply in good shape. Fort Parker Lake was 100 percent full and springs in the Navasota below it were pouring enough water into the river to easily handle the city's daily demands.

Under normal circumstances, the city uses between 700,000 and 800,000 gallons of water a day, and in the height of summer that can spike to about 1.2 million gallons.

But the rains didn't come and the heat did. Never before has Groesbeck experienced 90 days of temperatures over 100 degrees in a single summer. This year it did. The springs virtually dried up and water stopped flowing over the spillway. Essentially the Navasota stopped running.

In a recent article in the local Groesbeck Journal, public works director Keith Tilley did the math: Over the 90-day period that the temperature reached 100 degrees or more, Fort Parker Lake lost about 731 million gallons of water to evaporation and the city used 54 million.

The inexorable result is that the lake has virtually dried up, and the level at the spillway is so low it is only a matter of days before it becomes impossible to siphon water over it back into the river.

In August, Levingston sent a letter to Groesbeck residents asking them to conserve. By mid-September, she said, she instituted Stage 3 water restrictions, which included an outright ban on all yard watering.

Usage has dropped to about 600,000 gallons a day, and Levingston hopes to keep it there.

"We're going to have to stay in Stage 3, which of course kills everybody's grass, everybody's plants outside all of that, which takes away the beauty," she said. "But … do they want the beauty, or do they want the water?" In late October, the city signed an agreement with the owners of an abandoned, water-filled quarry to buy the water with the intent of pumping it about 200 yards into Jack's Creek, a dry tributary of the Navasota River. The hope was it would make its way down to the Navasota and eventually into Fort Parker Lake, where it could be siphoned over the spillway and back into the river.

No guarantees

But it took six million gallons and a week of pumping for the water to fill Jack's Creek and reach the Navasota. And Tilley said there's no guarantee the water would make its way to the spillway at Fort Parker Lake.

"If you spread that water out into the middle of a dry lake bed, it's going to evaporate faster than you can pump it," he said.

So on Wednesday, the City Council approved a plan to pump water directly from the Navasota about a half mile upstream from where it enters the lake and pipe it just over three miles around the lake, through a state park and back into the river below the spillway. Water will be pumped from the quarry into the Navasota if needed to maintain the current water level.

The TCEQ has signed off on the plan, and the city expects the Parks and Wildlife Department to do so Monday.

The pipeline could be completed by the end of the week, and the six-month plan could cost the city about $295,000 - not an insignificant amount to a small, agricultural town whose biggest employer is a 1,000-bed federal prison.

Tilley, a lifelong resident of Groesbeck, is cautiously optimistic about the plan. But he is adamant about the need for action.

"We gotta get something done soon," he said. "We've got three weeks maybe, and that's about it."

The prospect of running out of water has ignited a debate about how the city could be caught in such a situation.

"As long as we had water, no one really worried about it," said Tom Hawkins, publisher of the Groesbeck Journal. "Now that we're at the point where we don't have any, I guess most people are now thinking we should have had a Plan B."

Second-guessing

Most people you talk to think that plan involves drilling wells to tap into the Midway Aquifer that supplies nearby Mexia and other Limestone County communities.

"They should be trying to dig wells out here," said lifelong Groesbeck resident Gary Eakins, the manager of an auto parts store. "Instead they're going for a real short-term fix and praying for rain."

Martha Pippin, who has owned Groesbeck Antiques for 23 years, agrees.

"They should have dug some wells a long time ago," she said. "They should have had a backup plan."

Levingston concurs. Twice in the last 60 years or so, Groesbeck has confronted the vulnerability of its water supply - once during the epic drought in the 1950s, and again about 20 years ago during a legal battle over water (ironically with the company that owns the quarry) - but chose not to do anything about it.

She says she is determined to come up with a long-term solution before her term expires in May, and council has taken a step in that direction by hiring an Austin company to look for viable water wells. But right now she is focused on making sure the city's taps don't run dry.

That sense of urgency was evident before Wednesday's emergency City Council meeting when a member requested some time to consider the options before casting her vote.

"We don't have time," the mayor said bluntly.

tony.freemantle@chron.com