David, if your house has a 1000sqft footprint, about 450 GALLONS of water fell on your roof today. What did you do with it? What did your xeriscaping neighbors do?

Did you collect any of it, divert it to a swale or basin around a shade or fruit tree, or just watch it run down the driveway and into the street gutters?

Lawns are water and nutrient hogs, I'm certainly not advising them.

I've got to agree with the Big Grey Man, laziness probably has something to do with it. All that concrete, rock and gravel, along with the paved sidewalks and streets are nothing but heat storage units. Texas isn't hot enough, raise the thermostat?

Or maybe it's just ignorance, which can be fixed. But Texas has made more information available on rainwater collection than virtually any other state. So why aren't more people doing it? And I'm not talking just about a bunch of rain barrels in the front yard, there are all kinds of ways to store water, even if it's just in the ground.

As it is, I would suspect that most of the rain that falls in urban areas of Texas just runs into the Gulf. I wonder how many millions of gallons that is?

Sue