Perhaps nothing says “Texas” like the Brazos River, the 10th longest river in the U.S. and the longest river entirely within the state of Texas. Powerful and temperamental, it meanders 840 miles from Lubbock to the Gulf of Mexico. Home to blue herons, white egrets, hawks, and golden eagles, its flow and color change (clear, green, brown, and red), with the state’s topography and climate as it runs through canyons, limestone cliffs, rolling plains, prairies, savannas, woodlands, and the Gulf Coastal Plains.
Formed by the Salt Fork, Clear Fork, and Double Mountain Fork tributaries, which emerge in and flow through the Llano Estacado, the massive Brazos provides water for some four million people in the Brazos River basin and supports wildlife, industry, ranching, agriculture, cities, towns, recreation, and mining. It has several notable tributaries and a storied history–its abundance of life-saving water led the Spanish to call it “Los Brazos de Dios,” translated as “the arms of God.” The first non-Hispanic permanent settlement in Mexican Texas was founded by Stephen F. Austin on the banks of the Brazos. Until 1865, the lower half of the river ran through the state’s greatest concentration of slave plantations. In Waco, where the Brazos and its tributary Bosque River converge, sand bars and natural shifts on the river’s bed briefly made the river shallow enough to provide the only natural crossing for cattle for hundreds of miles, and the river was part of the Chisolm Trail. Forty-six years ago, the bones of Ice Age Columbian mammoths were found along the creek bed of one of the Brazos’ tributaries in Waco.
Today in Waco, the Brazos is where Baylor students and football fans can enjoy games at McLane Stadium from their boats–a tradition known as “sailgating”–and fly fishing in the river started early this year because of an early warm front. Tubing, kayaking, and rowing are available to the public. The seven-mile Riverwalk is set to get a $26 million facelift, potentially starting later this year with better flood-proofing and an homage to Sandtown, a local Hispanic neighborhood that thrived there until the 1960s.
Along with many municipalities along the Brazos, Waco is also looking at the ecological issues that afflict the river–namely pollution and overuse–and getting the public involved. Last March, Waco launched its first World Water Day, during which volunteers picked up trash along the Brazos and tested water from the river. According to this year’s World Water Day impact report, 57 volunteers eradicated 1,146.4 pounds of litter from the river.
“What you need from the Brazos has always depended on where you live,” says Baylor alumna Dr. Kenna Archer, associate professor of history at Angelo State University and author of Unruly Waters, A Social and Environmental History of the Brazos River.
“In the Panhandle, the Brazos is an ephemeral river,” she says. “It becomes a trickle then disappears entirely in places, only reemerging during seasonal rainstorms. That’s where people historically needed more water, and the focus has been on irrigation and water reclamation.” As the river gets closer to the Gulf, she says, it’s wetter, more humid, and flood-prone. “People often had too much water and needed to stop the overflow,” she says.
Drought is a pressing issue as well. “The Brazos River was always subject to low flows as well as high flows,” Archer says. “The floods were often more visually dramatic and got more publicity in papers, but the droughts were equally problematic. There were times when the Brazos ran so low in Waco that people walked across the river from bank to bank, never getting more than their ankles wet.”
Across the country today, she says, evaporative water loss at reservoirs like Lake Waco is also a concern. “Anybody who has seen photographs of Lake Mead near Hoover Dam has seen the somber markings along the cliffside rock formations that testify to dropping water levels in that reservoir.” Texas’ own Canyon Lake is seeing historic low water levels heading into this summer.
The Brazos is dammed in three places along its main stem, all north of Waco, forming Possum Kingdom Lake, Lake Granbury, and Lake Whitney. Several dams were also built along the tributaries, and there are smaller dams in some places forming reservoirs for individual cities, including Lake Waco. Along the Lower Brazos River there are no limestone cliffs that can take the weight of dam construction like there is in the Upper and Middle Brazos, Archer
notes. “Many of the soils have a high capacity for shrinking and swelling or are very wet, and they often simply collapsed under large development projects, or the river shifted course.”
May 2024 was reportedly the wettest month in recorded history in Waco. On May 6, flooding in the area closed State Highway 6 between Valley Mills and Clifton, and caused Lake Waco levels to soar more than 20 feet above normal, necessitating a release of water from the dam. “That’s good news and bad news,” says Archer. “It means the dam did its job helping to hold back some of the flow but also means there was so much water that some had to be released; the dams couldn’t really hold back all of it.” Floods have always struck the Brazos River Basin regularly and will continue to do so, she adds. “It’s been that way since the beginning.”
Evidence shows that in the 1700s, the Wi-Ko Nation built their villages along the higher-elevated west banks of the river to avoid flooding. Reports by European colonizers, Archer says, include letters from the 1750s by Franciscan priests serving at a mission along a tributary of the Brazos complaining about excessive flooding at the site. Once American and European settlements expanded, written complaints about flooding increased.
“Like the spring floods we just saw in Waco, towns became islands in a sea of Brazos River overflow or were washed away,” Archer says. There were references in the 1830s, 1840s, 1870s, and 1890s to homes being uprooted by floods and then floated down the river. In 1859, flooding carried away a bridge along the Lower Brazos and in 1876, floodwaters covered the tops of telegraph poles in Fort Griffin along the Upper Brazos. “That’s pretty clear evidence that the Brazos could be wild and unruly along its entire length,” Archer says.
The regular cycle of floods continued into the 20th century. In 1913, she says, flooding along the lower Brazos River was so severe that the Colorado and Brazos Rivers left their banks and merged to create a continuous water plane near the coast, almost 40 miles wide. In 1929, the
Texas legislature created the Brazos River Authority, specifically to develop and manage the water resources of the entire river Basin–the first such agency in the country.
The current series of dams along the Brazos have helped to bring a measure of control to the watershed by moderating the river’s flow, Archer says. “There is no doubt that the dams have helped to reduce flooding over time,” she says, “but they have not and arguably cannot eliminate flooding along the river.” In 1976, flooding was so intense 160 miles north of Waco at the Possum Kingdom Dam that water poured over the tops of the dam, and the reservoir, intended for flood control, overflowed.
Similarly, the 1989 flood swamped Waco and parts of the Baylor campus after the backup system failed. In that case, the flood was caused by an overflow of Waco Creek, meant to serve as a drainage for the main river.
As devastating as the floods are, Archer notes, the Brazos and the people it serves have other problems–namely pollution and over-use. Different parts of the river have different levels of protection, she points out. In the Upper and Middle Brazos, for example, concerned citizens and environmental groups spurred the creation of the John Graves Scenic Riverway, which was threatened by sand and gravel mining. Legislation was passed to tighten the requirements to get permits for such operations, and the law now requires the state to provide regular water quality testing. Meanwhile, according to a 2022 report from Environment America, the Lower Brazos Watershed is the second-most polluted watershed in the United States by toxicity-weighted chemicals. Releases into the Brazos from Dow Chemical’s Dow-Freeport–the largest chemical plant complex in the Western Hemisphere–is the biggest source of toxic pollution in the Lower Brazos Watershed. Dow is also the biggest consumer of Brazos River water, taking 100,000 gallons a minute from the Brazos to use as a coolant, according to the Texas Commission on Environment Quality. Some 95 percent of the water is returned, but it contains chemicals.
The Texas Observer did a series of investigative articles in 2023 that spelled out these and other looming environmental crises for the Brazos and other Texan waterways caused by industry polluters, illegal quarries, overdevelopment, mismanagement, an indifferent public, and global warming. From the reporting by the Texas Observer:
- The “Gordian Knot” is overdevelopment–the difficulty of balancing the needs for jobs and municipal growth with the reality of a finite usable water source. By 2040, the estimated demand for water from the Brazos is expected to outpace supply, with the biggest demand coming from population growth spurts in medium-sized cities such as Lubbock, Abilene, and Waco.
- In recent years, the Texas Commission on Environment Quality (TCEQ) has been accused of not sufficiently protecting the Brazos and other rivers, giving developers and other polluters too much leeway. In 2021, twenty environmental groups petitioned the federal Environment Protection Agency to force the TCEQ to improve its record.
- Seventy-five of the state’s 460 stream segments that are currently designated “impaired” by toxic sediment, too much bacteria, excessive algae growth, and/or mercury in fish and shellfish, flow into the Brazos.
- Environmentalists say there is a lack of planning by city officials to find ways to get impaired waterways off the impaired list. The Clean Water Act requires each state to have a plan to repair its rivers and streams. The TCEQ has been accused of dragging its heels.
- Between 2018 and 2022, Dow-Freeport violated federal limits on pH, solid waste, or chemicals released into the Brazos more than 20 times. These included releases of copper, which can be toxic to fish and other marine life, and halocarbons, chemical compounds that are toxic to wildlife and humans. In 2021, Dow earned $3.2 billion in gross profits. The TCEQ fined Dow $28,350 for these violations.
- During a 2011 drought, Dow asserted its “senior water rights,” which allowed the corporation to draw staggering amounts of water from the Brazos over other businesses, farmers, and ranchers. A court battle ensued, and Dow won. Under the TCEQ v. Texas Farm Bureau decision, any big company with older water rights can keep the public from getting water even during severe drought; even over “exemptions based on public health safety or welfare concerns,” according to the TCEQ in a report to Texas legislators.
- Dow-Freeport operates with a wastewater permit that expired in 2019 but has been “administratively continued,” (by the TCEQ), which allows it to follow outdated regulations and rules of operation.
- Dow manufactures nurdles, microplastics that have reportedly spilled into the environment. As reported by the Texas Observer, “A citizen science initiative called Nurdle Patrol, organized by the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, has documented nurdles around Freeport on the Brazos River, the Intracoastal Waterway and on the area’s popular public beaches.” The plastic pellets can block the digestive tracts of the animals that consume them, and the minuscule plastic balls act as sponges, absorbing toxins – all of which can be passed through the food chain to humans.
“People are also responsible for dumping chemicals into the river,” Archer says. Weed killers used on lawns and medication–including birth control–that is dumped in toilets and down sinks can permanently change the chemical composition of water. “Many chemicals or chemical compounds cannot be removed fully or effectively from treatment plants,” she says.
“There is also sometimes a misconception that all stormwater is piped directly to wastewater treatment facilities,” Archer says, “when in fact, various pollutants, including auto oil, pesticides, and plastic bags, are often carried directly from streets to drainage channels to the rivers and reservoirs during rainfalls.
“It’s not just the Brazos River where you see companies with enormous stakes around water,” Archer continues. “There are businesses that effectively own entire rivers and watersheds. This is often invisible to the public. You don’t necessarily see signs telling you, ‘This is part of the ecological footprint of Dow Chemical.’” It’s up to the public to ask questions, she says; find out where their water comes from, who is using it, and who owns it.
“We think of water as a renewable resource that lasts forever,” Archer says, “but it’s not that simple. Water can be lost over time. When you throw away a plastic bottle containing water, that water is probably not going back into the water cycle. When the industry replaces fresh water with water containing chemicals and microplastics, the quality of the water is compromised. Water evaporating in Waco doesn’t necessarily rain back to earth in the same location. And there are only a certain number of times a river can be diverted until there is not enough water to support different uses.”
Caring for the Brazos River and all waterways requires a multifaceted approach, Archer says, starting with the people who bathe in, drink, and fish from the water. “There are many demands on and uses of our water resources, and the general public has to get involved,” she says. “It’s the only way to ensure the quality of our water today, and to ensure there will be water for the future.”
