Lake Travis Crosses Full Pool at 681.25 Feet, and LCRA Expects It to Keep Rising

AUSTIN — Lake Travis is full, and then a little more. The lake's instantaneous elevation reached 681.25 feet at 8:30 p.m. Wednesday — a quarter of a foot above its 681-foot full pool, into the flood storage the reservoir keeps above it — according to the Texas Water Development Board's reservoir page, which carries the Lower Colorado River Authority's gauge at Mansfield Dam. At 11:30 in the morning the same gauge read 680.81 feet.

The LCRA's own flood page, updated at 9:00 p.m., tells the calmer half of the story: the floodgates at Wirtz Dam and Starcke Dam upstream — which had been passing floodwaters down the Highland Lakes chain into Travis — are now closed, no floodgate operations are underway at any of the Highland Lakes dams, and the authority continues to release storm runoff through hydroelectric generation. On the daily conservation-storage measure, the state's page put the lake at 99.2 percent full for Wednesday.

Full is not the ceiling here, and the LCRA says so in its own numbers: Travis's flood pool holds another 776,000 acre-feet above full pool — '31 Lake Austins' worth,' in the authority's phrase — precisely so a rising lake can be absorbed instead of passed downstream all at once. The authority forecasts the elevation to reach between 681.5 and 682.5 feet over the next 24 to 48 hours, still well inside that flood storage.

The watch item is the weekend. 'With more rain forecast this weekend, conditions remain dynamic, and LCRA may need to open floodgates in the coming days,' the authority wrote Wednesday night — the same weekend system this station's weather desk has arriving Saturday. For a lake Austin spent years watching fall in drought, a Wednesday that ends above full pool is its own kind of headline.