With drought continuing to plague the Hill Country, one local developer has offered to step up and provide local firefighters and wildfire responders access to retained rainwater free of charge.
Ben Wolff is building an equestrian center off a 60-acre tract of land on Sisterdale Road in Sisterdale, where he has plans for 90,000 to 95,000 square feet of rooftop. This could lead to large amounts of collectable rainwater, which inspired Wolff to reach out to the local fire departments for free access to the increasingly valuable and scarce resource.
“The fire department is probably 300 yards down from our facility, so we drive by it all the time,” Wolff told The Star. “And just thinking about the drought and the increasing risk of fire and just the fires we’ve seen this summer, we went to their benefit auction they had a couple weeks ago, and that’s where I said, ‘Let’s just see if they’d like to have access to it if that’s something the community could benefit from.’ And he (Sisterdale VFD Chief Brian Reilly) was pretty excited about it.”
The offer to provide free access to stored rainwater to help fight fires mirrors the overall mission associated with Wolff’s facility, which he said is intended to benefit the community and fill a missing need.
There are plans to build three roughly 52,000-gallon rainwater retention tanks, which Wolff said are intended as backup water for horses and other farm needs when or if the water levels in the wells on the property drop. But he soon realized the sheer volume of water these can collect – with only an inch of rain needed to fill the tanks – and the idea was sparked to find ways to benefit the community.
Access to water for firefighters and wildfire response teams has proven difficult as wells and streams have begun to dry up in the midst of the ongoing drought striking much of Texas and weighing heavily on the Hill Country. Reilly said those willing to step up and help the community when access to a crucial resource like water remains unreliable was both appreciated and reflects the strong sense of community the local agency has worked very hard to retain.
“Just to have people coming up and both of them within a couple of minutes from our station offering access to hundreds of thousands of gallons of water in what are likely to be pretty reliable sources because of their size, that means a lot to us,” Reilly said. “We put that 30,000-gallon tank behind the station a few years ago, and so far, our well seems to be keeping up, but there’s not guarantee there.
“So, if our well suddenly went dry, you couldn’t suck out of the water out of the river right now with a straw. Not to mention a fire suction. It just isn’t deep enough, and it just isn’t flowing enough. So, for people to be stepping up right when we need that sort of thing and saying, ‘I will store very large quantities of water and give you access to them’ is a big deal. That really helps us. We are a long way from hydrants out here, so that sort of thing makes it reasonable.”
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