Texas Fauna Project

TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEWEE: Nico Hauwert

INTERVIEWER: David Todd

DATE: September 23, 2025

LOCATION: Austin, Texas

SOURCE MEDIA: MP3 audio file

TRANSCRIPTION: Trint, David Todd

REEL: 4218

FILE: BartonSpringsSalamander_Hauwert_Nico_Austin_Texas_23September2025_Reel4218.mp3

 

David Todd [00:00:02] Well, good morning, David Todd here, and I have the privilege of being on the line with Nico Hauwert.

 

David Todd [00:00:12] And with his permission, we plan on recording this interview for research and educational work on behalf of a small nonprofit called the Conservation History Association in Texas, and for a book and a website for Texas A&M University Press, and finally for an archive at the Briscoe Center for American History, which is based at the University of Texas at Austin.

 

David Todd [00:00:37] And I want to stress that he would have all rights to use the recording as he sees fit. It’s his to play with.

 

David Todd [00:00:45] So, first I want to know if that’s a good arrangement for you, Dr. Hauwert.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:00:50] Yes, it is. And I totally consent to the recording and the use of the of the stuff we talk about today.

 

David Todd [00:00:58] Cool. All right. Well, great.

 

David Todd [00:00:59] Well let’s get started then.

 

David Todd [00:01:02] It is Tuesday, September 23rd, 2025. It’s about 10:10 in the morning, Central Time. My name is David Todd. I am representing the Conservation History Association of Texas, and I am in Austin. We are conducting a remote interview with Dr. Hauwert, who I believe is in the Austin area. Is that correct?

 

Nico Hauwert [00:01:26] That’s correct, uh-huh.

 

David Todd [00:01:27] Okay.

 

David Todd [00:01:29] Dr. Hauwert, by way of introduction, is a hydrogeologist, a researcher, and a conservationist known for extensive work studying groundwater, cave ecosystems, aquifer preservation, and the creatures that are dependent on central Texas karst systems. His efforts have been really diverse, but they’ve included studies on groundwater flow, geochemistry, cave mapping.

 

David Todd [00:01:57] And a lot of it, as I understand it, has been driven by the goal of protecting some of the rare creatures that depend on the karst systems that include the Barton Springs salamander, but also number the rare creatures like the Austin blind salamanders, the Jollyville plateau salamanders, Tooth Cave spider, Tooth Cave ground beetle, Bone Cave harvestman, Bee Creek Cave harvestman, and other creatures that live with us here in Central Texas.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:02:34] And also human creatures that rely on water to drink, you know, for the water supply. So, that’s been one of my objectives, too, is to, when I’ve seen some really bad stuff go down that people just don’t, aren’t aware how vulnerable their drinking water supply is.

 

David Todd [00:02:50] Yeah. Save the hominids!

 

Nico Hauwert [00:02:55] Well, and I should add maybe a little bit about his career. During his career, he has served as a program manager for the Balcones Canyonland Preserve, with Austin Water, and as a senior hydrogeologist for the City of Austin, and as an assessment program manager for the Barton Springs Edwards Aquifer Conservation District.

 

David Todd [00:03:17] I hope I’ve got that mostly correct.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:03:20] Yeah that’s right.

 

David Todd [00:03:21] Please fix it if I have misspoken.

 

David Todd [00:03:24] But today we’ll be talking about Dr. Hauwert’s life and career to date and especially focus on what he can tell us about the Barton Springs salamanders and their environment and their conservation.

 

David Todd [00:03:36] So, that’s the plan and I hope that sits well with you.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:03:42] Yes.

 

David Todd [00:03:42] Cool, all right.

 

David Todd [00:03:43] Well, let’s start basically chronologically. I was wondering if you might be able to tell us about your childhood and early years and if there might’ve been any people or events in those early days that might’ve influenced your interest in science and the natural world, et cetera.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:04:07] Okay. Sure. So I grew up kind of a child of the Cold War days, 1960s. And my father was in the Dutch Navy, an Allied soldier in Indonesia. You know, and he apparently what he saw in Indonesia, the imperialism there at that time, the CIA had done a coup in Indonesia and kind of took over the government. But he didn’t really tell me exactly what he all saw, he wrote some journals about it, but apparently it was enough to make him when he came to the United States to become a Quaker, which is a pacifist group that believes in nonviolence and so forth. And lots of the folks in the Quaker church were Vietnam veterans and people who had been soldiers in the war and apparently had a hard time taking it later on.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:05:01] So, um… So, he came to Houston, met my mom, who was, you know, she came escaped from the East Germany. She was a, came from a very wealthy family. Her dad was a congressman. And you know she had escaped the wall to come there and met my dad. And they were together and he was trying to get a degree in engineering at Texas A&M University, and kind of ran out of money and ran out of first, you know, it was his last semester to finish his degree, had a kind of a nervous breakdown trying to pull everything together with children and, you, know, family and degree.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:05:47] And so, unfortunately, at the time, the Defense Department, you know, he went to a mental state hospital in Austin because he had a nervous breakdown. And at the time, they were going to release him, and after he seemed better. But then they said, “Oh, we want to keep him a little longer because we think he has depression.”

 

Nico Hauwert [00:06:07] And they started applying electrical shock treatment, which some of the psychiatrists from the ’60s could tell you there was a lot of defense money going around to psychiatrists. You could get money to study how to use electrical shock treatment to make someone compliant and use it for a truth serum.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:06:27] So, unfortunately, he came back completely changed, and detached, which is part of what the purpose of electric shock treatment does, you know. And one day he just took off. We never blamed him for it because it was the electrical shock treatment. It wasn’t the way he was at all normally.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:06:45] And so, he took off. My mom was left with the children to raise, and she had a degree in education in Germany, but the East German government wouldn’t send her education degree because she’d snuck across the border, you know.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:07:02] So, she went to the, we ended up in the housing project in Third Ward in Houston, which is government-subsidized. We were the only white family in the housing project. And she could go to the University of Houston and get her second education degree.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:07:20] And so, yeah, so we grew up in that setting. And it was really kind of a blessing to be able to see like how people grew up in Houston at the time of the ’70s and the things they had to, the injustices they had to go through.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:07:35] You know, police would just come and take a boy when they had a crime to solve, they would just get a boy from the neighborhood and, “Oh, crime solved”, you know. It wasn’t the one who did it and had anything to do with the crime.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:07:46] But it was very interesting to see things like that that no one would believe who was outside, you know, who hadn’t lived in the situation, you know.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:07:56] So, I grew up in the Third Ward. I was very young and insecure, scared of everything when I was 10 years old. And one day when my mom told me to get out of bed because this guy was trying to break in the window and I needed to help with a baseball bat to fend him off and I was just too scared. I was in bed. I’d just pretend like I was asleep and didn’t wake up.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:08:24] But after that experience, I kind of changed where I learned one thing – that I didn’t want to be that way. And so part of my early experiences was actually learning, teaching Judo myself from a book with my brother. And then, and, and a lot of, you know, I was still like a Quaker where you’re supposed to be nonviolent, but when you were, when your friends were attacked by people, I learned to be, to defend them, you know.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:08:59] And for a couple of decades, you, know, if a woman was getting raped, I would get in between of that. If some black friends were getting beat up by some white guys on motorcycles, I would get in between that, you know. And that seemed to be my role for a while.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:09:15] But one of the things really on my path of what I am as a scientist, too, is that what my dad had told me after I ran into him years later in Arizona. And he said, “Always do what your boss tells you to do.” And, you know the way he said it after from the electrical shock treatment it’s like, “Okay, you know …”

 

Nico Hauwert [00:09:36] And so, defining me as a scientist, I learned not to do what my boss tells me to do. My boss always seemed to have different motivations about not wanting to look here, not wanting to look there and don’t focus on this and I’m not giving you the resources to do that.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:09:56] And despite those obstacles, you know, could I look at the truth in reality and study it, you know, the best I could.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:10:05] So that’s kind of my background.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:10:09] But then when I was in, later in high school and college, I got a degree in geology. And actually, I really wanted to be an explorer. So, I spent six months in Peru. Explorers Club would send me up to the mountains of Juarez or to the Amazon jungle region where they hadn’t seen a white person in decades, you know. And to just explore for six months Peru.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:10:37] And it was interesting, you know. And I didn’t even have a tent you know, so I was really good at building shelters and everything back then.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:10:47] But one experience when I was going down to the Amazon Basin from the mountains, the ants there when I slept on the jungle floor would just cover me up and they didn’t bite me, but they just covered my whole body up. And when I woke up in the morning, they were gone, but they had eaten up all my clothes. And I just was so tired. I just kind of slept through it.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:11:17] And then also that night when I was trying to sleep against a tree at night. You know, a jaguar came up to me and sniffed me, you know. Of course, I was by myself and then the village, you know, and by the way, in Peru, you know, I never experienced violence, you know, anywhere, even though the, you know, people were convinced I was going to die in the jungle and, you know, there was no violence at all.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:11:48] There were people, even with the animals – other than the ants hitting my clothes, you know. Piranhas were in the river, but they don’t really bite people like they show you in the movies you know. So, we and the little kids from the village would swim in the river. And, you know, it didn’t really bother them.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:12:09] But after writing up these (some of them got into guidebooks and everything, some of the writings I would do for the Explorers Club), I’d come back to Austin and raise money like as a landscaper for like six months. But I had to live because my rent would take all the money. So I lived in the woods and caves of the preserves that I would later manage. The caves later became later city property.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:12:35] And I worked as a landscaper in the daytime and got enough. I was supervising Hispanic crews because I could speak Spanish pretty well back then.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:12:46] And then after six months I got enough money to go do a journey in Europe. And so, I got to visit the Jotunheimen Mountains that’s behind me there in the ’80s. And this was just after Chernobyl had gone off. And some of the nuclear emissions were going across Europe, including the Norwegian mountains, affecting their habitat there.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:13:14] But I also got to go across East Germany, where my mom had come from, and see what that was like, and go to Austria and Switzerland and Sweden and all over, yeah, to explore Europe.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:13:32] And that kind of shook me, too. I was already into exploring caves before then. So, it was amazing to be coming to Austin and seeing the pristine streams here. And the caves, they were just like nobody knew that there’s this whole underground world that nobody knows about.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:13:56] And so, I was really passionate about exploring the caves around Austin and also in Mexico and other places too. But that was kind of my early life that shaped me toward the studies.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:14:10] And it was the direct exposure to caves that made me really suitable for studying groundwater because most of the scientists who studied groundwater at the time, well, a lot of them were consultants for the wastewater industry in the ’80s. Austin was trying to grow big, to get a big tax base here in Austin.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:14:33] And so most of the scientists who were studying them really didn’t like caves or had anything to do with it. They had this conception about how things were like in the subsurface, that water moved through little pores, and caves really aren’t that substantial. There’s one here, one there, but they’re rare. And they really had no idea about it.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:14:55] But other places where they have caves, like in Mammoth cave, by the ’80s, they had already done pretty extensive studies about how well-connected the cave systems were, and they used dye-tracing. And there was ATM standards and EPA standards already written out by folks like Geary Schindel and James Quinlan, Tom Bailey, who was kind of the grandfather of tracing.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:15:18] And I was aware of them and aware that they hadn’t really been applied here in Austin at the time. So, it was a simple matter. There were standards and there were manuals. Let’s just do it, including sampling the water, which when I started working for the water district in 1993, I was surprised that people could say, “Well, we know the aquifer treats the water because nobody’s found contamination in it.”

 

Nico Hauwert [00:15:54] But then nobody had sampled it for pesticides and petroleum and trace metals and a long list of parameters.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:16:01] So, I started doing that in ’93 and ’94 and found there’s pretty widespread contamination across the Barton Springs segment.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:16:11] At that time, based on the scientists’ recommendations, it was common to take your wastewater, treat it to some extent, and then irrigate it. And they did that in Travis Country and Shady Hollow. They did that in Georgetown.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:16:28] And they had a pathogenic outbreak in 1980 in Georgetown where 8,000 people got sick from the well water, out of 10,000 people on the well water. So, 80% of the people in the city got sick because the well operator Ernest Robles told me he’s pretty sure it was because there was a golf course that was irrigating with wastewater and that was probably what contaminated the water well.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:16:53] But it wasn’t the only place that happened in San Antonio and Braun Station in 1984. Their wastewater system contaminated their well water and about 2,000 people got sick there.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:17:07] And then in Austin in 1997, 1998, I’m sorry, in Brushy Creek, north of Austin, there was a lift station, a wastewater lift station, had over-spilled into the creek. And I remember first reading in the paper that don’t worry, the water table’s 200 feet down. You know, you don’t have to worry about it.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:17:29] Well, it happened that the year before I had been tracing in North Austin and saw the rapid groundwater movement there. But, and sure enough, you know, about 2,000 well owners in the area got sick, you know from a pathogenic outbreak.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:17:48] And there were a number of other cases that Iooked like pathogenic outbreaks to me, but I was authorized not to investigate them in Buda and Bear Creek Estates. And I’m sure it happened moreover because it’s hard to make the association between people getting sick and a particular source. You have to investigate it, get samples, and do a more thorough one.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:18:10] But after the water sampling that I did, the water quality sampling, it was fairly controversial and also the fact that they were developing Circle C at the time and they didn’t find any caves at all in the Circle C area, which I thought was impossible. And so, I went out there and kept finding caves with Bill Russell with the Cavers Grotto.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:18:36] And that was apparently irksome enough that the developers went to the legislator and got the funding cut of the Barton Springs – Edwards Aquifer Conservation District in half. They were getting money from pumpage fees from commercial wells. They would get 31 cents per thousand and then they had to reduce it to, they had to reduce it to 17 cents because of the legislator.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:19:01] But then I just switched to getting grants and we got to fund a lot of studies with grants that made up for that.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:19:10] And so, then in a few years, in 1996, we got to do the dye-tracing on a widespread basis, starting with Barton Creek and every year we’d move up to a different major creek and show that what people thought took years to get from arrival actually happened in days. And it showed you that there was very little filtration going on.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:19:36] Directly with tracing where you put a tracer in the ground and you’re able to pick it up on charcoal or you could take water samples you know. So, every quarter of a mile on the Colorado river I would canoe and put samples on there, because unlike other people who already knew that all the water went to Barton Springs from Barton Creek, you know, I guess I was dumb, I didn’t know that.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:20:02] So, I monitored everywhere it could possibly go.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:20:05] And we saw surprisingly enough that most of Barton Creek actually goes to the Colorado River and comes out at Cold Springs. Only the portion downstream of Loop 360 recharges to Barton Springs at all and then it kind of splits. You know, below loop 360 on Barton Creek. That’s only about a, it’s about three-mile stretch. And some of it goes to Cold Springs, some of goes to Barton Springs.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:20:32] So it turned out that the major source of water feeding Barton Springs, particularly during a drought, is the Blanco River, which is a whole different watershed than the Colorado River. But it’s what keeps Barton Springs flowing during the drought times.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:20:49] And that was surprising – the fact that the water moved like highways through major flow paths, and I could define those, only about four major flow paths where the water moved really fast through. And the rest of the aquifer, the water moved pretty fast, too, through caves.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:21:13] So, that was some new information.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:21:16] And I got to directly show it with tracing, which was the standard across the world, but finally got to bring it to Austin area to show them on that.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:21:27] And then I followed up with other studies.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:21:29] There was a whole lot of thought that trees use water, so that if you want to save water for Barton Springs, you need to clear the trees out of the area. So, the first time, and probably the only time in Austin, I put a climate tower up, which is a big 50-foot tower that measures evapotranspiration. And I put this on a tract adjacent to the, a city tract adjacent to The Wildflower Center. And then I had flumes, which are big, basically, metal trenches that you measure the flow. And I had rain gages, and I had moisture meters in the soil.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:22:12] So, I could measure all the components of rainfall, except what goes into the ground. And so, that was a part I was measuring, is how much recharges.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:22:22] And I came up again, so the first most direct measurement of how much water goes in the ground, because I measured all the components, but that one. And that was the remainder of the equation.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:22:32] And it and it turned out that a lot less water evaporates than what people think. They thought it was 85% based on some pretty bad, I mean, pretty rough data. And I came up with about 60% of it, 60% to 70% of it evaporates.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:22:57] And the other thing I saw with taking other people’s data, as well, who did some of them did forest and cleared areas with towers like mine, is that the trees really take in the water during the wet periods. And during that time, that’s when they’re reducing. The only time we saw really flows for the most part is during flooding time.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:23:19] So, if you’re reducing the runoff, you’re reducing flood flows.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:23:25] And the other studies have shown that the roots also are very important for channeling the water into the ground. So, trees actually increase water going into the ground. During the dry periods, they kind of cut back on the amount of water they take in and the amount of water they evaporate and transpirate.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:23:46] But evapotranspiration also isn’t a bad thing. You just don’t want to do it too fast. The reason it’s not bad is because evapotranspiration cools the area. So, a lot of times when you have these extreme summer temperatures and people are attributing it to climate change or carbon emissions, it’s actually deforestation where you’re lacking evapotranspiration that cools the area locally. So, that was another thing I got to show with science.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:24:19] That still hasn’t really sunk in very much locally, so I have to make another effort to get it out some more.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:24:28] And then also got to show that the massive clearing caused a lot of sedimentation and filling up of the reservoirs. Lake Austin filled up in four years after the initial dam was built. And that sediment eventually, more of it, made its way actually to Matagorda Bay and made a peninsula there. They knew that it came from the Austin area, you know, as a result of our deforestation.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:24:56] So, when people walk the land and they see there’s not much soil on the upper areas, I’m coming to see that, came to see, that’s not a natural condition. That’s because they had deforested it and you lost the soil and that that soil had acted as a reservoir. It also helped to reduce flooding. And then once you clear the trees, that reservoir is gone. And then the sediment will fill up the artificial reservoirs you’ve made, which further reduces our water supply.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:25:28] So, these are all factors affecting ours.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:25:31] The other thing too is that a famous meteorologist, Jerome Namias in the ’60s said, “The reason y’all had this bad drought in the ’50s, it’s not because of the heating of the, or cooling of the Pacific waters, you know, El Nino and La Niña.” He said it’s the heating of the ground surface because there’s no moisture there is creating a high-pressure system that’s called anti-cyclone. And nowadays they call them heat domes that causes the incoming storm systems to divert over to the east.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:26:05] And then it’s making it more intense in places like Arkansas and Alabama, sort of like you’re batting that high-pressure system toward them and they’re getting more tornadoes and things like that.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:26:15] But we get less rainfall as a result of the high-pressure system from the heating, the dry heating, of the ground surface, which is directly caused by people, and not necessarily carbon emissions. Even though carbon emissions will have a factor, I think a lot of our lack of rainfall and the heating is stuff that we’re doing, our local landscaping.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:26:41] The other thing I got to see regarding the salamanders is that in the 1890s, Dr. Hill had written, a geologist, had written that they see salamander pretty much all around in wells from Austin to San Antonio.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:26:59] And knowing that information, but we explored caves, some of the caves like near Brody and Slaughter, the cave goes all the way down to the water table and we kept looking to see if we’d see salamanders there. And sure enough, we found Barton Springs salamanders there. They’re 10 miles away from Barton Springs. And the water goes to Barton Springs.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:27:21] Zara was a cave-oriented consulting firm, and they still are, that had an officer in Manchaca on it. And they started looking at their well, 200 times, and eventually found a Barton Springs salamander in it, in Manchaca.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:27:39] The other thing is that when I mentioned to you that in Travis Country, there had been wastewater irrigation. In my study in ’93-94, I got to document that their wastewater irrigation was contaminating a spring on Barton Creek called Backdoor Springs, which is near Sculpture Falls. And there’s a cave there and a spring that comes out. And I got to document it for the first time in ’93- 94 that the wastewater was causing that.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:28:14] And consequently, as a result of the tracing and the water sampling I was doing and the pathogenic outbreaks that occurred, the state agency, TCEQ, kind of forbid further wastewater irrigation on the recharge zone.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:28:30] And the data I produced was also used to list the Barton Springs salamanders endangered in the 1990s, because they didn’t have that data before to show the sensitivity of the aquifer, the contamination, and the rapid speed of the groundwater flow.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:28:49] And I was on the Recovery Team task force for the Barton Springs salamander and for the Balcones Canyonland Preserve. And kind of in both cases, it wasn’t necessarily a government agency saying, “Yeah, we want to be progressive and we want to protect our water supply and wildlife. And so, we’re going to do this.”

 

Nico Hauwert [00:29:10] No, it was in the case of the Barton Springs salamander, of course, a lot was Save Our Springs. We did a lot of activism. And said that your regulations aren’t good enough to protect the Barton Springs. So, we’re doing a petition to the citizens and it was approved by citizens that we want a more strong ordinance than what you’ll come up with.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:29:34] And the City, you know, when I worked for them, it made them so mad that the citizens can come tell you what to do. And, but they did and it, it was, and it was a good thing.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:29:44] But similarly with the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve for the wildlife in the caves, in 1988, Fish and Wildlife wasn’t listing any of the species that had been petitioned for years as being endangered of the cave species.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:30:01] And there was also the birds, the golden-cheeked warbler and the black-capped vireo, they were becoming rarer and rarer. And some activists with Earth First camped out in caves there at 2222 and 620 in some of the caves, to bring attention to the fact that that developer said, “Well, I could just build on it because they’re not endangered and the city doesn’t care.”

 

Nico Hauwert [00:30:30] So, one of the city staff actually keyed them on that this was going on. So, they had this protest in the caves, and it got nationwide attention. And within one month of their protesting, Fish and Wildlife decided to list these cave species as emergency listing as endangered, after all the publicity they got.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:30:56] So, once again, it wasn’t because of the agencies being progressive and thinking, “Oh, we need to protect our water supply, our wildlife.” It was the citizens who were, activism, who were aware of the situation, who took action and made it happen.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:31:14] And this is a pattern I saw. I worked for the city for 24 years and, you know, Barton Springs District for six years. And it’s kind of a pattern I saw is that you can’t necessarily rely on the agencies to protect your water supply in a proper way.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:31:35] For 20 years now and more, the city has spent millions of dollars on trying to, their action to try to save Barton Springs is clearing trees. They spend millions on clearing trees on conservation land. Some of the biggest clearings are actually on city-owned land, and they claim it increases recharge to Barton Springs, but there’s no scientific basis for that. And many studies show that it doesn’t do that.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:32:03] So, until citizens come up one day (me as a scientist, I can write it up and publish papers about it to show this), but until the citizens actually be aware and take action on it, the recharge to Barton Springs and the money that’s misspent on it will continue to be wasted. And then in the future generations, they’ll have to spend a lot more money to counter all of the bad things that the city has done. Because people would not take action on it, and counted on the city to do the right thing.

 

David Todd [00:32:43] So, it sounds like there’s been kind of a pattern that you’ve noticed that a lot of the impacts on the watershed are, it sounds like, largely non-point, that there’s, I guess there’s some concentrated wastewater irrigation that’s going on, but did you also see any effects from really localized spills? I think you mentioned one that there was a spill that went into Brushy Creek and contaminated the aquifer. But does it tend to be more sort of long-term non-point pollution that you see as a problem? Or is it more sporadic, concentrated, sort of catastrophic releases?

 

Nico Hauwert [00:33:42] Yes. What I saw, particularly with the sampling in ’93, ’94, is there were specific locations, like there’s a place in Oak Hill where they had a leak of petroleum, and you could see it really strongly in the cemetery well nearby, you know?

 

Nico Hauwert [00:33:58] And the fact that there were specific chemicals, like there was a chemical that you would see in Sunset Valley, I believe it was Freon, that the USGS could later sample for. And they could trace it to upper Barton Springs, which is one of the four springs that is, from our tracing, we determined that’s where that goes from Sunset Valley.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:34:22] And they also found that some specific contaminants from the Buda area would show up at Barton Springs at the other springs, that that particular flow path goes to the Eliza, Old Mill and Main. When I sampled, old Mill Springs because the city didn’t want me to sample the other Barton Springs, I did see petroleum in it, you know, and a lot of those are probably from specific point sources.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:34:54] And so, one of the solutions the city had for, because the citizens now made them have to have non-degradation, you could do a development, but it has to be non- degradation. And so, the solution is, as they said, that if you irrigate your stormwater over the soil, it will treat it 100%, you know, until I came along and used tracers to be able to trace from the soil down into the caves underneath and show that that really didn’t happen. Also, I could compare surface runoff to the cave drip quality, and you could see the same peaks of trace metals where they were coming through without attenuation.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:35:34] But one of the solutions that the city had was just don’t sample Barton Springs around rain events. And that will keep the aquifer clean. So they forbid, at least while I was at Watershed, from sampling at or around rain events, which is the ASTM standard for determining pollution sources is you want to get your auto samplers and start sampling during rain events to see the peaks. That’s when most of the contaminants are going to come through, and that’s, if you want to really see the extent of contamination of spring or water supply, is you want to sample around rain events.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:36:17] The other thing I was going to tell you, by the way, about salamanders is that I did mention to you about the wastewater treatment in Travis Country and how I detected it in Backdoor Springs. And so, back then, we went to Backdoor Spring a lot to sample it for the next 20 years, never saw a Barton Springs salamander. But then in 2018, Barton Springs salamanders are there in Backdoor Springs on Barton Creek.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:36:44] And so, it’s a known site now. And so, some of the salamander biologists hypothesized that it maybe had been exterminated there because of the wastewater impacts that I documented. And now that they’ve cleared out, they’ve come back there.

 

David Todd [00:37:09] So, one of the things I think that you observed was this practice of filling caves, and I’m wondering what sort of impact you saw on the geohydrology from that kind of practice.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:37:27] Yes. So, the filling of caves was a common practice, both with ranchers and pioneers, a lot of it dating back to the 1800s. But ranchers found out that if you take a big bowl sinkhole and you plug the bottom of it, you can make a stock pond for cattle. And that was the peak of the cattle empire was the 1940s. And so that was a very common practice.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:37:53] Also, every ranch had a cave where they would dump their trash in if they were in a cave area. And that was all the way up to, across Texas, all the up to Lampasas. The caves would be filled in with trash. And some of them had four or five caves that were filled with trash.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:38:11] They also would fill in caves because they didn’t want open pits for the cattle to fall into. And one example is at Goat Cave which had a goat ranch and the cavers rescued a goat that had fallen in the 20-foot pit because they hadn’t fenced it or anything like that. But most all the caves, like there’s one near Slaughter and Brody, which is an open 80-foot pit straight down, were clogged with sediment to keep the, it were filled in so that it wouldn’t be a fall hazard for the livestock.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:38:50] The other reason, by the way, on the Blanco River, it was documented in the 1890s that there was a major cave on the Blanco River at the mouth of Halifax Creek that would take all the flow of the Blanco River during the time. And that was problematic because they had a mill in the Kyle area. And that cave’d take all of the water from the mill. So, they made a concerted effort in the 1890s to fill this cave up.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:39:16] And the effect of all this, by the way, you know, when in 2015, we saw really bad floods in the Blanco River, it’s not just that one cave, but all on the upland areas, the caves were plugged to make stock ponds. And many caves were filled to make trash. Others were filled in just to reduce the fall hazards.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:39:35] And then, of course, a lot of ranchers envision maybe selling their land for development. It’s not marketable to have caves on your property. So, you’ll see whole areas where there should be caves where they have an assessment that says there’s no caves here.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:39:51] And so, those factors had a huge impact on the recharge to the springs. Also, a lot of our water supply is actually spring-fed in the reservoirs. And so, when you plug up those, you will lose that.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:40:08] And the soil, which acts as a reservoir, also would kind of partition the water slowly out.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:40:16] The other big factor, of course, is the flooding impact. When you’ve plugged up so many caves, you’re going to have really bad flooding as a result, because it’s all going to runoff. And that was the intention of the pioneer ranchers, to keep water at the surface. They didn’t want it to go in underground because it was too dry, it made the creeks too dry.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:40:38] And so, that practice in my scientific evaluation has greatly increased flooding, reduced recharge to the aquifers, and affected our water supply for our drinking water as well.

 

David Todd [00:40:58] Well, so I think when you started some of this discussion about groundwater, aquifers, and caves, you mentioned that you were unusual in actually having inhabited caves and explored caves. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your experiences underground in caves. It’s kind of unusual life. A lot of us haven’t done that. And I’m wondering what you’ve seen, what you’ve found while you’ve been underground.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:41:37] Yes. So, one thing, as I mentioned to you, when I was younger, 10 years old, I was very insecure, scared of heights, scared of snakes, scared of everything. And so, in the course of, and I see this with caves a lot, is that when I take, for example, I’ve now excavated caves for low-income kids that I’ll take into caves, and they’ll go in really scared. And then it’ll cause a change in them to where they get excited. They have to go in eight times around it, you know? You see this change from fear to excitement, and it’s really kind of cool because you’re learning how your fears can be changed into an energy, and that you don’t have to destroy everything you’re scared of, but they can help develop you and empower you.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:42:33] I learned that. I love snakes now. In my office at Balcones Canyonlands sometimes we’d have six copperheads out the door and we love to just watch them. We just were careful not to step on them. I would typically run into caves a lot, sometimes face-to-facing in caves and I’ve never been bitten by a snake. I’ve got a relationship going with them where I won’t kill them and they won’t bother me, and same with coyotes and other wildlife, you know, brown recluse spiders.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:43:07] So, what happened is that when I came to Austin, you know, in ’79, one of my first cases was Airman’s Cave, which I happened to come across at Barton Creek. And it’s a very, you have to wiggle through it to get through it, and no one had ever told me about it, but I just came across and said, “It looks like people go in there.” I was with some of my friends, and I couldn’t talk them to going in, but I wiggled in and came into this room inside and it was just amazing to me that there were caves out in Austin, that it seems like nobody has explored or seen, and they’re just all over the place. And that was really intriguing to me to study them.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:43:52] So I hooked up with the UT Grotto, which is a local cave club, and they have a lot of experience. They can teach you safety techniques and take you to certain caves that you can experience safely with them under their mentorship and then we do lots of projects together where we’re digging out new caves and mapping caves.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:44:15] So, we’d go to Mexico to do expeditions in the El Abra mountains, looking for new caves as well. And later in Quintana Roo area, so we’d map caves in Mexico, also in New Mexico.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:44:39] So, that’s how I started out. I got a lot into caves on my weekend time. I would be exploring caves and digging them out, digging them up of trash. Some of them had huge amounts of trash, like Midnight Cave, I’ll share some pictures of you for it when it was full of trash and then, and now it’s just a beautiful cave with a pool of water at the bottom. Beautiful cave.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:45:05] And the Wildflower Center, when they first opened it back in ’93, the cave there was full of trash, and we got together and emptied it out. And then we could take 2,000 school kids a year, you know, the Watershed Earth Camp program could take them in there, mostly Title I schools. Even when they’re just, you now, later on, the wildlife came back too, tricolored bats came back to the caves, the cave invertebrates came back after we emptied them out of dirt and trash. And that was really cool to see, too, the wildlife coming back to them.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:45:44] And, um, but yeah, a part of a lot of cavers, you know, we’ll first have this experience where they first experienced fear and then it changes into like an energy source, you know, cause you’re, your fear changes into excitement. And, and it’s just exciting.

 

David Todd [00:46:04] That’s a pretty powerful experience to be underground. It’s a pretty alien world to be in, I think, for most of us. No light, sometimes not an easy exit.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:46:19] Yeah, we bring our own lights in there, so we always have lights. But I did practice while I was managing Whirlpool Cave as a volunteer for six years. There was a long cave. I did practice, like seeing if I could come out without light, you know, just for my own practicing, you know, being trying to sense walls and things like that, you know, so.

 

David Todd [00:46:42] Do you find it if your eyes don’t have stimulus that your hearing adjusts to, you know, sound that might tell you where the walls are?

 

Nico Hauwert [00:46:56] Yeah, it seems to be kind of a hearing thing where you can sense the walls, the sounds bouncing off the walls maybe like bats do.

 

David Todd [00:47:06] Well, something I wanted to explore with you, and we may need to circle back to some of the science, because that seems like such a strong suit for you. But it appears that a lot of your efforts to map and monitor and do dye-tracing and so on happened within this box of what was allowed. You know, that there are agencies and municipal powers that, you know, they don’t want to have inconvenient truths out there. And I was wondering how you’ve operated as, as you said earlier, you know, a scientist who’s seeking the truth, but sometimes that truth is awkward and people really don’t want to hear news that makes them uncomfortable. So, how have you negotiated that?

 

Nico Hauwert [00:47:59] Well, it’s a very common experience, by the way. So, even before I worked with the Water District, I had worked for a private consulting firm called Hall Southwest Corporation. And our clients were like, let’s say, Diamond Shamrock and mining companies. Some of them were spring owners whose spring had dried up. And I figured out how that happened and fixed it, but a lot of them were commercial folks.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:48:26] And, my mentor hydrogeologist, had been caught. He was very popular with Diamond Shamrock. And it turned out that he was faking water samples for them. But the owner of the company was one of the most equitable and honest, surprisingly enough, for a commercial company, right? One of the most equitable supervisors I had, where he laid off the guy once he was discovered faking samples, even though it brought in so much work for the company. And it was, so he made the right decision on that.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:49:09] But most of the other agencies I worked for, including the Barton Springs District, you know, one of the general managers came and told me to come in the office, like, “I know this groundwater tracing you’re doing is really cool, but we all know that golf courses are environmentally sensitive now, and I want you to shift your science to show that’s true, because we all know that.”

 

Nico Hauwert [00:49:36] And so, you know, I would never go along with that. Like in that case, I had resigned after six years at the Barton Springs District, you know, when I was confronted with that obvious corruption.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:49:50] But the other, even the city, it was very common where this would happen. And one of the things I mentioned to you was the quandary where now they’ve got, at Watershed was responsible for keeping the water in Barton springs clean. It’s, you can develop it, but it’s got to be non-degradation. And how do you show that?

 

Nico Hauwert [00:50:10] So, I had a lot of times the staff would come in the office, and say, “Well, what do you want us to do? If you’re showing that it’s not treating the water, then what are we supposed to do?”

 

Nico Hauwert [00:50:20] It’s like, you know, “Just tell the truth.” You can’t, you can’t develop over a sensitive aquifer and not degrade it, you now, it’s a simple fact, you know, and just be honest about it.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:50:31] But one case was in Barton Hills right near Barton Springs, the environmental officer would allow the developer of this one company to not put water quality ponds in. And I told them that it looks like from all the geology that this water that’s coming from a spring going down the hill is feeding Barton Springs. And I said,” I can prove it with dye-tracing. It’d be really easy to pull off.” And they told me, “No, we don’t have the resources for that. We’re assuming it’s outside the Barton Springs Zone.”

 

Nico Hauwert [00:51:05] Um, and so, we don’t have the resources for it. And furthermore, even though my staff had been, I had a staff who would be measuring Barton Springs. It wasn’t written on the permit. They said, “You only can have people on the permit measuring Barton Springs.” I tried to get them on the permanent for seven years at that point. And they wouldn’t put them on it. But he goes almost every day and measures the flow, you know, so it’s like a permit violation if you look at it.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:51:33] But suddenly, when I talked about tracing it… They said, “You can’t access the spring unless you’ve got a permit. Nico, you’re too busy to go out there and take these people there.”

 

Nico Hauwert [00:51:43] But I hooked up with University of Texas, was looking to have their student do a study, a dye-trace study. So, they did this study and I kind of helped them. And they sure enough showed that the water from the spring that had been getting all of these variances, we picked it up within 100 feet of Barton Springs.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:52:02] And I got written up. I had to have an attorney and a union protect me from the investigation they did on me. There was a lack of communication, is what they call it, that we had told you we didn’t want that traced. And you did it anyway.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:52:23] Another case later on was this 1,000-acre piece in Hays County called, it was on Hudson Ranch and there was going to be a Jeremiah Ventures development. And they wanted to bring back that wastewater irrigation for 600 homes that we hadn’t seen since the TCEQ banned wastewater irrigation because of my earlier studies.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:52:46] But the director of Watershed said, apparently while I was out there with a court order finding a cave a day when they said there were no caves out there, my team were finding a cave a day, and the director was secretly meeting with developers to support their development.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:53:06] And when it came to city council to approve it, city council said, “Where’s Nico? Because I would never be invited by the director, even though I was the expert on the tracts and everything, to come and speak on behalf of them. But they insisted that I be called in to come speak to the city council.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:53:27] And there’s an article in the Chronicle I can send you about Kathy Tovo said, “Well, we heard Dr. Howard, and he was very convincing.” Our director and her cohorts met me on the way, including my supervisors, and they said, “You know, we think this is going to be a model development. We hope there’re going to more like this.”

 

Nico Hauwert [00:53:48] And I said, well, do you know about the pathogenic outbreaks? And do you know about the tracing I’ve done up here and how close it’s connected to Barton Springs?

 

Nico Hauwert [00:53:58] And then I’ve also toured other plants where they had expected, like in Scottsdale, Arizona, where they expected that they were going to treat wastewater to drinking water standards and then irrigate that and use it. And they told me that at the plant that it wasn’t working like they hoped it was and that nitrogen levels kept coming up.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:54:19] Found that it cost a million dollars to treat the water to that level, and so like in a case like this, they were surprised how much that cost, and you can expect somebody who’s looking at their profit margin might say, “Well, nobody’s going to notice if we don’t treat it this day, and we just irrigate it.”

 

Nico Hauwert [00:54:37] And there are so many well owners that were downgradient, that I was pretty sure somebody would have died from it, you know.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:54:45] So, the city council said, you’re going to buy that tract, and now it’s conservation land. So, it never got to be a development with irrigating huge amounts of wastewater, irrigation.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:54:56] But of course, the director was very upset with me. I was a target of harassment. My cave crew, which I had eight men and women that could dig out caves on development sites and help me with dye-tracing, were laid off from then on. And then, and that was kind of written up again and investigated.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:55:19] And so, I did transfer over to a different department and was in Austin Water that didn’t know all the trouble I make yet there.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:55:30] And, you know, but yeah, I saw there was a case in all the departments I worked for in the city where you had, sometimes they’re actually conflict of interest where the manager had a husband that worked for the developers that, you know, were next to the federal permit cave that I was trying to dig out. And there was concern that I might show like that development project to be more sensitive if the cave went under it, you know. This case was Mopac South.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:56:06] Some of the caves … like I mentioned Blowing Sink where we saw Barton Springs salamander in it. Well, because of negligence, it got plugged in an October 2013 flood and was still plugged up to now. But they asked me and I mentioned that this cave is one place you can monitor the aquifer in that area and see the impacts of things like MoPac South and everything.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:56:30] So, they made sure that that wasn’t reopened again while I was, for 10 years while I was program manager.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:56:41] So, that’s kind of, that’s how I deal with them, is I typically would rely on the union a lot and, but I would never lie for my supervisors.

 

David Todd [00:56:57] And this kind of pressure on a scientist, you find it occurs mostly kind of in a small agency that’s municipal and there’s just a lot more pressure on them or is this something you see on a more region-wide district level or do you see it statewide or at the federal level? I mean, does it dissipate as you get higher up or is it pretty consistent?

 

Nico Hauwert [00:57:25] No, it’s pretty consistent. You know, you might say it might be, maybe it’s human nature, you know that the people who rise to politics aren’t necessarily the honest ones usually.

 

[00:57:35] So one example like with the salamander is that Matt Lechner, who was an amazing biologist at Fish and Wildlife who got the Barton Springs salamander listed, would be very proactive in defending the salamander against development interests. And he got shipped off to, by Fish and Wildlife to the, I think it was Minnesota, some place nobody ever heard about to manage.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:58:05] Seemed like there was a common practice that when someone got pretty good at Fish and Wildlife they would get, you know, shipped off to the Russian front basically. You wouldn’t hear about them anymore from then on, you know.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:58:19] But, probably, it seems the same in the state agencies that I deal with. They seem to be really sensitive about that stuff. They’re very vulnerable to losing their jobs.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:58:32] And in the city, I’ve found most of the people who work there just get used to doing what you’re told and don’t question it, you know, if it means looking the other way. I think people have kind of accepted, most people have accepted that that’s just what you’re supposed to do.

 

Nico Hauwert [00:58:55] I was lucky to be able to survive 24 years of the city with the approach I would take of really shooting towards scientific honesty, and being progressive in getting that data the best I could, you know, with all the resources I could get to get new scientific data, which a lot of times contradicted what my managers would say, and they did not like that at all.

 

David Todd [00:59:24] Um, and how would you get some of this data? I mean, these are big projects and it’s difficult to do by yourself. Would you rely on the University of Texas or folks outside of your agency? How would you go about that?

 

Nico Hauwert [00:59:40] In some cases, like where you had federal permit caves right next to Mopac South, they were able to stop me for the most part from extending those caves. We expected they were going to go under the highway. And like when they did build Mopac South later, they, within a year or so they found 72 cave features and I’m sure some of them would have connected with our federal permit caves and that would have been a whole different ballpark.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:00:07] But I tried working, in the extent I could, first, I would try to use volunteers from the cave community when they wouldn’t have the funding for it and they would do it for free. But then my managers came up with this, “Well, you know, we’ve got to have protocols in place.” And it’s like for all the other volunteer activities, like for bird sighting, a volunteer we trusted could walk across the site and wasn’t supervised.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:00:37] But for some reason with this cave thing next to where we were digging next to Mopac South, we had all of these protocols which were never enacted. They never approved them, to where they even asked me to write a cave safety report, which I did in a few months. But even with that, it didn’t happen before the highway was built.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:01:01] So, in many cases, I was actually stopped from doing it because I didn’t have the resources, but sometimes I was able to pull together the resources to be able to move some of the studies forward.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:01:15] In some cases, I’d partner. Like in one case, I would trace, I partnered with the transportation department who needed a permit from Fish and Wildlife to expand Slaughter Lane. And so we had planned about doing these studies that we needed funding and they put in $100,000 to help us do some dye-tracing to study some of the federal permit caves that I couldn’t get money for otherwise.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:01:42] And some of it was just setting aside the land. I was very fortunate. It hadn’t happened for the decade before I was program manager for the Balcones Canyonland Preserve, but I was very lucky in trying folks to donate large parcels of land, 200 acres at Bright Leaf and other parcels be preserve land. So, almost every year I got new preserve land added to the city.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:02:12] Some of them I had to buy with the money we had in the budget, like half a million dollars or something. And then I also had, I was lucky that, you know, in some cases, I could negotiate with TXDOT to, um, give us 400,000 to dig out caves on our preserves next to the highways they were proposing to build.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:02:31] And that worked out to be really advantageous, you know? I wasn’t directed by them on what I could and couldn’t do. I just worked on our property. We found so many awesome caves that nobody could believe like Still Pipe Preserve, where one cave, all the caves had been filled by ranchers, but one cave had been discovered in 1990 and it was the sacred cave of the permit because it had so many different cave species in it.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:03:01] And then I come along with the cavers and we find like seven caves, some of them 500 foot long with 12-foot high ceilings. And this is partly from money from TXDOT, give us from mitigation fund for the 2222 bypass.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:03:16] So, I did negotiate. In 2000, I got the Blowing Sink tract with Blowing Sink, the deepest BCP cave. It had Barton Springs salamander. The city wouldn’t buy it for a million dollars.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:03:28] So, I negotiated with Arbor Trails, which is the Costco mall there at William Cannon and MoPac where they would buy it and offer it to the city in exchange for more intensive development on their Arbor Trails development. And the city ultimately accepted it. And so, that tract got donated for free to the city with some of the most sensitive cave areas that the city didn’t have a clue about before.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:03:58] But we did stuff like we took Bill Spellman in the cave, you know, and showed him to educate, try to educate the city more about it and its sensitivity, because we got to see it from underground up.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:04:10] And a lot of that was William Russell, who was the famous cave explorer, and later in 2019 they named that preserve after William Russell Preserve, so that’s what it’s called now, after he had passed away.

 

David Todd [01:04:27] You know, this effort to preserve pieces of land and particularly cave sites makes me wonder about something that I’d wanted to ask. It sounds like there are kind of two basic strategies for protecting geohydrology and surface hydrology. And one might be to have a built structure, you know, a detention pond or retention structure of some kind. And the other would be to lower the impervious cover or just set land aside entirely. And I was wondering from a geohydrologist which do you think is more effective? What sort of impacts have you seen from each approach?

 

Nico Hauwert [01:05:17] Yes. A historical perspective – by the way, 1921, I’ll send you this article from Char Miller, this guy from the Department of the Interior in North Carolina, his name is William Ashe, came down to Texas and at the time was trying to offer them that the federal government can try to help buy land to protect your water supply and reduce flooding risk there. If you all would just accept it, we’ just buy the land.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:05:50] And at that time when he came to San Antonio, San Antonio had a really bad flood in 1921 while he was visiting. And their solution was to build Los Olmos Dam, which they built in 1925.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:06:04] But what William Ashe told them is the reason you’re having bad flooding is not, it’s because you’re clearing all the forests here. And that’s what’s making your flooding bad. And so, if you were just to set aside land, you know, and let the government do it, then you can reduce your flooding risk. Okay?

 

Nico Hauwert [01:06:26] And, so, they built Los Olmos Dam and the flooding problems really haven’t got that much better in San Antonio.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:06:33] And you saw, I’ll send you an article that was quoted in the Kerr County Lead about solutions to their flooding problems.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:06:41] But that was brought up by William Ashe, who they named Ashe juniper for, back in 1921.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:06:49] And William Ray was also Department of the Interior, but lived in Austin, was also a professor at UT. And he said a similar thing. He said that the trees absorb your flood water, they recharge the water, the soil acts as a reservoir. This is 1904, by the way.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:07:08] And so, way before me, it was pretty much out there that if you just protected the land and the idea of this reservoir solution for everything isn’t necessarily going to get you out of the bind you want if you want to have water supply.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:07:30] And part of the reason is, as I mentioned, is that the reservoirs, once you clear the trees, the reservoirs are filling up with sediment.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:07:37] And the first dam that Austin had, they built in 1894, filled up halfway with sediment, halfway of the volume of it in just four years, because people didn’t think that clearing trees would have any impact on it, because you’ve got the reservoir now.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:07:54] But you lost half your reservoir storage, and then you also had this soil storage, which would seep water out and hold it longer, and you lost that as well, and now you’re just going to see what looks like climate change. It is climate change, but it’s local-affected climate change from loss of soil, which It has a lot of bad effects.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:08:20] You know, the evapotranspiration from soil helps to cool it out. It attracts rainfall, creates a low-pressure system, it attracts rainfall. That’s called the biotic pump hypothesis. And there are a lot of good things, the storage of water itself, and then the fact that if you lose the soil, it’s going to fill in your reservoirs.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:08:43] And the other thing about it is that the watershed protection solution of we’re just going to build all of these water quality ponds, they’re temporarily storage ponds, whereas the natural sinkholes in the area are like bathtubs that can take all the flood flows and take them down in the aquifer. Instead of just temporarily storing them in a pond, it will recharge the water and treat it.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:09:11] Now you want good quality water going in there and not development water necessarily going into the sinkholes. But the solution worldwide and other places like Vancouver and Portland and Virginia and Germany, the solution of course is to preserve enough of your water supply that you have a secure water supply.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:09:35] And it’s also for the water quality.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:09:37] The other thing is the air quality. Like where Los Angeles and that area has such bad water air quality, a study here in Austin showed that includes Austin shows that in Travis and Hays County, the forest will take in 96% of the particulate air pollution.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:09:56] But if you clear the forest or you burn them, you release that. And a lot of what that is is mercury that the trees have taken in, absorbed, and now you’re releasing it because you’re burning it or cutting it down and letting it degrade into the water supply.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:10:20] But a big thing in my mind, I’ve mapped about 10% of the whole recharge zone as being like a bathtub, an internal drainage basin, that most all of them, 90% of them, were plugged.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:10:33] And most all the caves in the Austin area were plugged before UT Grotto came along in the 1950s and started digging them out and unplugging them and documenting them.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:10:44] But from them starting in the 50s into 1990, about 20% of the caves they had dug out had already been filled in and built over again.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:10:56] And so, the fact that scientists would say, “Well, there are not that many caves. It’s an isolated phenomenon.” That’s just because cavers haven’t dug out all the caves yet. And that’s usually on a volunteer basis.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:11:08] Now for a while I did have a crew at Watershed and we could do it. But as I mentioned, after just four years they had laid off my crew of men and women cave diggers that were professional cavers associated with the Grotto that I hired to dig out caves.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:11:25] So now they don’t really have any cave expertise. And they rely a lot on engineering solutions, like water quality ponds and things. They will veer into riparian areas and wetlands, but, yes, the cave thing is totally off the screen. They don’t see that as an issue at all.

 

David Todd [01:11:50] OK. Well, you’ve given us this wonderful sort of background on water quality and water supply and on the caves and the aquifers and the effect on surface water and the forest role too.

 

David Todd [01:12:09] I was wondering if you could sort of help us package some of this context that you’ve given us from a hydrogeologic point of view and help us understand the problems that the Barton Springs salamander has faced and what some of the outlook might be for its conservation and its future, given that kind of hydrogeology that you studied for so many years.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:12:39] Yes. So, for one, it’s impossible to come up with an engineering solution, from my experience, that’s going to keep the water clean. And the accepted solution is you have to preserve enough land to protect your water supply.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:12:55] There’s a Hill Country Alliance report, by the way, that has shown that in central Texas, the investment in land protection has not kept up with the growth of the population. I’ll send you that report.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:13:11] So, that’s one thing. You can’t put water quality ponds to keep your water clean for development, just development intensely. It’s attractive because you get this tax base, but I’ve seen so many cities like Sunset Valley that took advantage of it, lost their water supply from contamination, had to switch over to the City of Austin water.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:13:35] Rollingwood, West Lake Hills, Georgetown, Shady Hollow – yeah, they had to switch over, which is now why so many people are more dependent on the Colorado River for their supply and why the usage is higher.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:13:53] So, you’ve got to keep up preserved land proportional to the growth and invest in that to keep your water supply clean.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:14:01] But that’s also going to apply to wildlife, of course, and the Barton Springs salamander, which is an indication that you’re having problems with drinking water. If its habitat is being contaminated and it can’t live there anymore. That’s one thing.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:14:17] Second thing is that the natural solutions of forests and natural cave openings, which have been anthropogenically filled, if they were restored by opening them up, it would solve a lot of your problems.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:14:30] As far as rainfall, you would attract more rainfall – the low-pressure systems from forests.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:14:35] You would reduce flooding because the environment would be taking in the water. Instead of what the pioneers and ranchers were trying to keep water at the surface. And they had highly engineered the landscape to keep water at surface.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:14:49] So, we need to counter that and get the water infiltrating again, promote the forests, open up caves.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:14:57] And the city actually has to hire cave experts to help guide them on this and not just overlook caves as being insignificant to do this on it.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:15:11] And the other effects, as I mentioned, is the air quality, that the trees help to improve the water quality for our water supply systems. They also help to clean the water quality, keep the soil in place, attract rainfall.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:15:29] And they also reduce wildfire risks. And if you look in Austin, the biggest fires we’ve had are like at Davenport Ranch near Wild Basin when they had cleared the trees for a ranch. And that was like a 400-acre fire that happened in 1961. We hadn’t seen anything that big before.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:15:49] We rarely ever get forest fires, because the forest keeps the ground cool and moist. So, they’re extremely rare. Most every day, the fires that happen are grass fires, which are easily ignited and get hot and dry in the summertime. And it’s the perfect media for fires.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:16:08] And where you have most of the fires nowadays are the city conservation lands that they clear the trees on, and that’s where they have fires escaping.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:16:19] In February of last year, they had a 200-acre wildfire get away when the contractor was cutting vegetation and it sparked, apparently started a fire.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:16:29] But the environment of clearing trees on a ranch land is a perfect setting for wildfires, as opposed to a forest. Looking at it as trees as fuels, but the actual fires we have in the forests here in Austin essentially don’t happen, you know, particularly if they’re not cleared and cut.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:16:53] Short junipers, you know that are regrowing from after they’ve been cut 30 years ago, you know they’re still trying to get the big canopy system, which is going to be cool and moist and prevent wildfires.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:17:08] We produced a report on that, if you’re interested, by the way, about the history of wildfires in Austin and looking deeper at what happened, and I can share that with you.

 

David Todd [01:17:19] Yeah, I’d love to see that.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:17:22] Well, give us a little insight about, I guess, what has always sort of raised the profile for a lot of these concerns that you’ve had and you’ve studied, is the Endangered Species Act, and you’ve got this suite of creatures that’s very dependent on the aquifer and the springs. Barton Springs salamander, I guess, has always been kind of the poster child. Can you kind of run us through the impacts these salamanders have experienced from these changes in the aquifer in the central Texas area?

 

Nico Hauwert [01:18:01] Yes. So, one thing that we found about salamanders is that you have to look for them a lot sometimes to really look for them and see if they’re there.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:18:12] So, one example is just in 2021 when I was program manager for the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve, I hired a biologist to go to the mouth of Bee Creek and look really hard, a number of times. They’d never found salamanders there, but she found one, a Barton Springs salamander of the mouth of Bee Creek, which is near, upstream of Tom Miller Dam and Red Bud Trail in there.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:18:37] And looking at history from Robert Hill, USGS, 1890s, talking about salamanders being found in wells and springs across, between Austin and San Antonio, we learned that they were probably fairly widely distributed then.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:18:58] So we started looking more for them across the area and finding … and it doesn’t mean that they’re not, like the Barton Springs salamander still is constrained to the Barton Springs segment, you know, and it’s not, that it’s not in need of being endangered species protection because it still could be very, very easily wiped out.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:19:22] I think as we saw at Backdoor Springs on Barton Creek where It wasn’t there for a long time when you had that wastewater irrigation. And we’ve documented the impacts of it.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:19:37] You know, so the salamander still is very vulnerable to being eliminated, particularly if you’re going to encourage growth.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:19:47] And I think now at the City of Austin, they’re kind of in a stage like they were in the ’80s where they’re in a deficit and they want to encourage growth to try to get more tax base and more tourists, maybe at the expense of the environment, you know, as opposed to investing in making sure we’re going to have a secure water source for the future.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:20:09] And some of the strategies, instead of setting aside land, they’re looking to go pump water out of the Carrizo Wilcox, which is like in the Bastrop area. Things like that, you know.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:20:24] At one time there was a Green water treatment plant that was downstream of Barton Springs, and then you could directly see the relevance of the Barton Springs with our water supply.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:20:37] But once we traced Barton Creek, I think it was around 2006, and it showed up in the Green water treatment plant. Within a couple of years, they seemed to think it was too political and so they closed that plant, and moved them upstream.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:20:53] But now one of the solutions is if they run out of water because a lot of water gains occur below Tom Miller Dam, you know, from Cold Springs and Barton Springs and other springs. So, during a drought, when your water supply is getting low, you’ve got this replenishment going on.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:21:10] And so, they realized that one of those solutions might be to put a little pipe over Tom Miller Dam and pump it up from there, which is kind of what the Green Water Treatment served before they closed it is to get it from Lady Bird Lake in an emergency.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:21:27] But I think what you’re going to see, and we saw this in 2018 flood, where it was already predicted by the USGS in 1915 that the Llano area had a lot of cattle, and there was a lot of sediment going into the Llano River, which in the flood of 2018 made its way to Austin and caused all three of the intakes to get plugged with sediment.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:21:55] You know sometimes you have to look up to protecting your upland water supply.

 

David Todd [01:22:03] [We seem to have lost the signal. Can you hear me? It may be your headphones have lost their Bluetooth connection. Why don’t you put your headphones away, and we’ll just use the laptop itself.]

 

Nico Hauwert [01:22:22] [Can you hear me?].

 

David Todd [01:22:27] [Yes, I can hear you now. Yes].

 

Nico Hauwert [01:22:28] [OK.]

 

David Todd [01:22:30] [Sorry about that little glitch.]

 

David Todd [01:22:33] So you were talking about the development upstream in the Llano affecting and clogging our intakes for water treatment in the city.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:22:47] Right.

 

David Todd [01:22:47] I love the way you’ve sort of connected these environmental things that are often couched in terms of impacts on creatures and reminded us that it affects people too.

 

David Todd [01:23:01] But it would be good to get your insight about the Barton Springs salamander. And you know, I understand that it’s pretty sensitive to the water levels, but also to the kind of water that they’re in and what the sediment levels are. Is that true?

 

Nico Hauwert [01:23:28] Yeah, about the sediment, so in the 1990s, when I worked for the Barton Springs – Edwards Aquifer Conservation District, we documented a number of sediment plumes that came to Barton Springs. And it was around the time they’re building MoPac South, by the way.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:23:48] And so, more recently, I think it was 2019, we had a sediment plume come through and I advised the city to one thing get samples of it because we had gotten good about analyzing sources of sediment from it. The second thing is if Blowing Sink had been opened you could have gone into Blowing Sink and see if you see that sediment plume coming through it, because a whole lot of MoPac South, which caused the original one, you would see it going through Blowing Sink Cave. It’s a great monitoring point for the cave stream in the aquifer there locally.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:24:25] But of course that, there were obstructions to keeping us from doing that and the thing about it is when this plume happened in 2019, it was another time when they were rebuilding MoPac again. We had another sediment plume and so the City and the Barton Springs District did a report. They didn’t include me, but they said we’ve never seen sediment plumes like this before and we think it came from this well in Barton Hills.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:24:53] By the way, it was a TXDOT contractor that pointed out to them this well. And maybe it was this well that they were drilling. I calculated that the amount of sediment coming through that sediment plume was about a ton of sediment. So, it was a lot of sediment for a well to come through.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:25:11] And it wasn’t true that you’d never had sediment plumes like that before. You had it back when they were building MoPac back in the 1990s you had plumes coming through to Barton Springs.

 

David Todd [01:25:24] And these plumes…

 

Nico Hauwert [01:25:27] And they excluded that stuff in the report. Yeah.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:25:30] And so there was a case in the history and I’m trying to remember if it was the 1940s where they had a huge sediment plume come through to Barton Springs. It was probably from the Creek flood and they had to dredge Barton Springs to get all that sediment out of it.

 

David Todd [01:25:51] And these salamanders are sensitive? I guess their gills clog, or what is it the concern there in terms of the salamander?

 

Nico Hauwert [01:26:04] Um, it could probably affect them. I’m not really clear on, on, I haven’t really studied how the sediment might affect them, you know, except their habitat filling up. It could be one thing.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:26:15] The cave down below at Barton Springs seemed to have been filled up from when we used to swim into it to get our dye receptors back in the 1990s. There was one cave in Barton Springs pool, about 13 feet below the water surface, you know, where the main flow comes in. So, there could be a factor if the caves fill in with sediment for the salamanders.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:26:39] But then there are also the contamination sources. And if the city does not follow ASTM standards or EPA manual standards in karst areas and sample around rain events, then they’re missing most of the contaminants coming through.

 

David Todd [01:26:58] And what about just the water levels in the aquifer? I mean, it sounds like there are lots of straws now going into the Barton Springs and even the Carrizo. How does that affect the salamander, do you think?

 

Nico Hauwert [01:27:14] Yes. It directly affects it. And an example is in 2000 at Jacobs Well in Wimberley, our team was measuring it before they had a USGS station there, and we documented ( and there was pumping at a golf course) that the spring directly dried up for the first time, Jacobs Well spring, as a result of pumpage.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:27:38] And the same with Barton Springs, the more they pumped, the more it’s going to directly affect the flow of it. It’ll directly reduce the flood and that’s flow of the springs. And that’s pretty well documented and understood.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:27:54] So, the more pumpage you have … so, the Barton Springs District tries to reduce the pumpage during the drought period. There’s some people, of course, that say, “Well, we can’t cut back, so we’re going to pump anyway.” This happened at Jacobs Well last year and it dried up for a long time because of that.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:28:15] So, it will affect it.

 

[01:28:16] One of the other problems, by the way, is that a lot of people don’t understand that you can’t directly measure the flow at Barton Springs. You can go online at the USGS and see a measurement for it and that’s based on a monitoring well that kind of basically looks at the level of water in the pool and correlates flow from that.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:28:38] But, the only direct way of measuring the flow is to go below the pool and we have to take measurements, usually like 80 measurements across the channel, which is very irregular. And the swimmers try to put or make a little rock dam at the Barking Springs to back the water up, which makes the flow even more irregular.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:28:56] So back in 2006, I proposed to build a little four-foot dam structure at the Barking Springs, which would serve their purposes for backing up water. And it would allow you to directly measure Barton Springs flow up to 80 cubic feet per second when the dam would be overtopped. And then you could have a direct measurement of Barton Springs that would be more accurate.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:29:25] But what happens nowadays is you get into a drought, typically at the pool, they will, for example, when the pool level gets low during a drought, they’ll raise the dam a little bit, and that causes it to seem like there’s suddenly a big increase in flow, because the USGS bases their flow measurements on the level of the pool.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:29:49] And then when the drought comes in and the Barton Springs District should be cutting back on pumpage, there’s usually a period where there’s overestimating the spring flow, usually maybe even 10 cubic feet per second sometimes. And that’s just part of the system actually. You have to directly measure it downstream and you can’t just do it once, you have to do it about three times. It takes about an hour to make one measurement of 80 different measurements, you know. So, you usually have to do it around three times, and you’ll get kind of a range that it could be. You can’t measure it precisely because it’s irregular.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:30:28] But just so most people aren’t aware that it’s really difficult to measure Barton Springs directly. And even since 1918, the only way you can do it is by physically measuring flow downstream of the dam, which usually takes 80 different measurements to do. And it’s irregular, so it’s not precise.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:30:49] They could put a structure there that would allow more direct measurement and the USGS is aware of this too that that would do it. But so far, since 2006 when I proposed it, Watershed hasn’t been really keen on the idea for some reason.

 

David Todd [01:31:05] You know, this difficulty of measurement and getting a precise measurement reminds me of something that I’d love to get your thoughts about, and this goes back a long way. I think in 1904, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in a case called Houston-Texas Central Railway versus East, and I think there’s this wonderful phrase they used about groundwater being “secret, occult, and concealed”. And I was wondering if that kind of mindset is something that you’ve run into before when people look askance, when you say, “No, these things are connected. Groundwater and surface water and aquifer here, springs there.” Is this something that you have confronted?

 

Nico Hauwert [01:32:02] Oh yeah, yeah, there seems to be such a prejudice against the cave and the cave stream idea. And this is kind of nationwide, by the way.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:32:14] When I was in Ohio working on my thesis, my professor told me there’s no such thing as underground streams. You know, that they envision the dowser who is trying to find an underground stream, you know? And so, that was apparently threatening the hydrogeologists enough that there was a concerted effort to say that underground streams don’t exist because we don’t believe in this dowsing stuff where they’re discerning underground streams with little forked sticks, you know. So, there’s kind of a prejudice against underground streams.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:32:47] And in Ohio, I had to show my professor that, you know, when this whirlpool formed in this guy’s pond and I researched it and I found out that this well a half a mile away, you now, caused the water to go down an underground stream and down to a lower level and dried this pond up, you know, this 18-acre pond.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:33:08] And it was actually an underground stream. And there actually are underground streams in Toledo, Ohio.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:33:15] But here in Texas, by the way, Geary Shindel, who was working for the Edwards Aquifer Authority, he came from Tennessee, where they had studied this more intensely and he got to write one of the ASTM standards back in 1986. But he got hired by the Edwards Aquifer Authority and was great in like bringing, introducing Texas to the concept about karst and bringing speakers from all over the world to tell them about what karst is like across the world.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:33:46] You know, it’s not just, you know, as opposed to where we’re at when I was here doing my studies, we seemed really inbred and kind of like socialized to certain beliefs that we just couldn’t get past, you know.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:34:00] So Geary Shindel had made a big difference in bringing in speakers and introducing hydrogeologists really to karst, you know, as opposed to me, who was this wild, crazy, young guy who came in here and was trying to tell people what, the way it was, you know. At least I wasn’t a lone voice anymore with Geary Schindel coming down.

 

David Todd [01:34:26] Well, you know, that makes me think about the community that you have found here. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the people that you’ve met who are cavers or hydrologists or geohydrologists or those who swim in the springs and kind of appreciate what you have done to protect those places. How would you describe that that tribe that realm of people?

 

Nico Hauwert [01:34:57] Yeah, yeah. So, for one, you know, if it hadn’t been for the people who love Barton Springs, you know, and as I mentioned to you, being active in protecting it, if you just relied on this city alone, it never would have happened. You know, and even encouraging Fish and Wildlife to list the salamander as endangered.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:35:22] So, yeah, so I think the swimmers played a very important role in that and hopefully continue to play an important role in basically keeping the, you know, the city and government agencies in check who would otherwise just try to get money from the tax base and whatever else, you know, thinking they don’t have to protect the springs.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:35:50] So, the cavers, you know, locally had been active since, had an important role. They tend to be kind of secretive so they weren’t really advertising a lot, you know, with the public. They kept cave locations very secret because people would go in and get hurt when they opened them up.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:36:11] But they had played a very important role in documenting the caves all the caves that were known for the federal permit. Most all of them had been dug open by cavers. There are 62 caves on the federal permit that the city agreed to in 1996. And many of them, by the way, some of them still are on City property that the City filled, and they’re on the permit. They’re still filled.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:36:38] The city says they’re protected, but I don’t consider a cave that’s filled in by the city back, you know, in the ’90s as being protected that used to have endangered species and you can’t find them anymore because they’re filled in with rocks and you can’t get down in there and see them. And usually that keeps the interaction of the crickets and everything that bring nutrients in their cave. It cuts off the nutrient supply in the cave.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:36:59] And so, usually when you fill in a cave there is no ecosystem anymore until you open it back up again.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:37:07] And some of these federal permit caves I mentioned to you – Blowing Sink you know that was on PARD property that we got donated for free to the City, negligence filled it in, you know.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:37:23] And there’s some, for example, Schroeder Park has about eight caves, one of them being on the federal permit for endangered species, still filled in, you know, and we can’t do anything about it.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:37:38] You know, PARD won’t step forward to help us allow that to happen.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:37:43] It’s not just the cave creatures either. There are rare flowers like the bracted twistflower, which you found most of the places where it used to be found are gone now, so it’s a very rare flower called bracted twistflower, Streptanthus. It is found at Mount Bonnell, and we have an agreement with Parks and Wildlife, Parks and Recreation that we would protect these areas where the flower is, but instead PARD put a stone staircase and won’t allow fencing off where people can have an illegal trail to go down there and they clear the vegetation and stomp where the bracted twistflower is. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:38:28] Yeah, it’s been that way for, we had an agreement with Fish and Wildlife, back in 2001 that we’d protect it. And as long as nobody knows about it and cares, I guess it doesn’t matter. That seems to be the guiding thing. The City won’t ever do anything about it, you know.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:38:47] And similarly with the bird species, you know, the golden-cheeked warblers that are endangered. You know, you’ve got to protect enough forest for them to be able to sustain here in Texas, and the city spends a lot of money on clearing trees. And I’m afraid that’s going to extend now to the Balcones Canyonland Preserve now that I’m gone from there.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:39:13] But the same division is the one doing a whole lot of the clearing, but it’s expanded into Parks and Recreation. So, a lot the BCP lands, they don’t even acknowledge as being BCP. Um, their land management plan a couple of years ago, their solution for all the promises, clearing trees and doing prescribed burns for all environmental problems.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:39:37] So, I’m pretty concerned where the City is going to go without folks like swimmers at Barton Springs or people like Master Naturalists who are concerned about the environment, or the cave community.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:39:50] And the other thing are some of the people who came from other areas, like I mentioned Geary Schindel. James Quinlan was a park ranger at Mammoth Cave who had done really innovative studies of caves there and Mammoth Cave and wrote a whole lot of manuals about how you should protect cave areas across the world.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:40:12] He’s passed away, but his influence is very strong in our area about what are the right procedures for protecting your water supply.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:40:20] And I followed his lead a lot on the studies I did here in the ’90s.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:40:26] In addition to Tom Aley, who is still alive, and he’s a, I consider him the grandfather of tracing, where he also has a lab that does a lot of the analyzes for the dye tracing. And he uses all the profits from his lab to buy caves for Tumbling Creek Cave in Missouri around it. He’s very committed to it and has been coming up with methodologies on dye-tracing and how to do it. And we had him come down in the ’90s and advise us on how to pull our tracing off.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:40:57] And Tom Aley is with Ozark Underground Labs in Protem, Missouri. And he’s still there and was a very important figure in us getting into where we do dye-tracing and understanding the system, the groundwater system we have.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:41:16] In addition to actually going down there physically with the cavers and studying it. And one study I did was with, also I did dye-tracing and some of the cavers dug the cave streams in North Austin. And we connected caves in the Buttercup Creek area, which is in the Brazos River watershed. And we were able to directly follow the caves and trace the water to Lake Travis and Cypress Creek.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:41:39] Which is contrary to what all the scientific, the Texas Water Development Board and the BEG [Bureau of Economic Geology] anticipated where the water would go. It went in a different direction and it again ties to our water supply, but we wouldn’t have known that if we hadn’t traced it, and the cavers hadn’t actually physically connected the caves that way.

 

David Todd [01:42:00] Well, so this is so interesting. I love the way you follow the truth wherever it may lead you.

 

David Todd [01:42:10] And it sounds like, and this may be just my view from outside, that some of this has been about money and political influence from the Barton Springs salamander. And I’m wondering. I mean, A, is that true? And if it is, how you view this salamander. I mean is it kind of a legal pressure point for protecting the springs and these aquifers? Or is it just an ecological player? Or do you see it as kind of you know, a fellow creature on the planet that is due respect or is it like an indicator for our water supply system? It seems like there are lots of ways to think about it. I’m curious how you view it.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:43:07] I view it as a whole ecosystem in the water, you know? And then above the water there’s this whole ecosystem of terrestrial creatures that live in caves, including like tricolor bats.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:43:18] You know, and bats are of course real important for Austin too, they’re our mascot.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:43:22] But it used to be that if you leave up to the City, you see a bat, you kill it. You know? If it’s in the stadium, they used cyanide capsules. “See a bat, kill it” was the mantra until Merlin Tuttle came along and told people that bats are really important and they play an important role in both our human health because they reduce the pests that people and farmers used to treat pesticides with and so you’re actually having a better health and they do a free service.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:43:56] And then of course for tourism in Austin, the bats have attracted lots of people to come see the bat flights once we stopped killing them and started kind of protecting them.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:44:04] But they don’t, the city doesn’t have any staff that are dedicated to really protecting bats. So, it’s kind of a iffy thing. And some of the people from the Animal Commission had recommended the city get a bat specialist. The biologists I worked for were bat specialists, but they are three people who are covering the whole city for all the species and all the caves that are protected, you know. So, it’s not much of an investment to cover.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:44:33] And for example, at Congress street to do public education, everything, you know, there, the City doesn’t have any dedicated people on that.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:44:42] So, but as far as the salamander goes, in the aquatic life, it’s not just a salamander, there’s a whole ecosystem of other kind of life that I got to study with them.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:44:54] Crystal Datri was a biologist we hired at the BCP to really study all the other life that’s there in the springs in addition to the salamander, you know, just and study their roles and where they are and how they’re impacted by, of course, you know chemicals and things like that. And finding where they are and whether or not, you know.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:45:19] But one of the first steps in protecting them obviously is finding them, you, know, so that you know that they’re there.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:45:28] And by the way, we had a sculpture put up for the salamander over on, I don’t know if you’ve got to see the Violet Crown Trail at Convict Hill. I was just there a week ago for a cleanup, but we put signs and a cave mural and it’s Convict Hill at, basically going under MoPac in South Austin. And there’s a little sculpture of a salamander that we put up there and yeah.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:45:55] That’s nice. It seems like you’ve made a lot of efforts to make them visible, you know, whether it’s taking people into caves or putting up murals or you know showing the dye-tracer results.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:46:10] Can you talk a little bit about your career as a hydrogeologist as you, you know, you’re still in it, but you’ve also got a number of years behind you. What do you think about this job and where it’s taken you?

 

Nico Hauwert [01:46:25] Yeah. Well, first off, you know, when I got my degree, my bachelor’s degree in geology, it didn’t seem all that hopeful of getting a job. But a lot of my older friends suggested that I should just be a restaurant manager or something. And a lot my jobs were at restaurants. I did work at the vertebrate paleontology lab at U of T for an intern, but lot of places I worked in restaurants and washing dishes for Luby’s and, you know, landscaping and other stuff, because it was kind of hard to find jobs in geology.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:47:02] And it did help when I got more advanced degrees, but I think the timing also when I’ve got my degree, the oil market crashed or a lot of the oil people went into the environmental business, which is where I wanted to work in.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:47:15] I did have a job for a while temporarily on offshore drill rigs, because that was a job I could get, you know with my degree.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:47:22] But for the most part, I wanted to work in environmental geology, you know, protecting water supplies and things like that. So, I took classes like virology that weren’t typical classes you’d take, instead of petroleum geology or something like that.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:47:43] But eventually when I, because I couldn’t get a job for a while really as a geologist, so I traveled, you know, the world for some and then I went back to graduate school in Ohio.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:47:54] And then when I graduated there, I really didn’t have much of a problem finding a job from then on. I worked for a consulting firm and then the Barton Springs District.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:48:06] And so, a lot of young people ask me about what, should I get a job at something that’s marketable? And of course, my advice is always to do what you’re passionate about. You want to work in something that you, that you love doing and not something that’s marketable for a job.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:48:27] And I think in my case, too, I was glad that I stuck with geology and hydrogeology and my passions of things like studying caves and stuff got to really come into play.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:48:42] And forests, I really loved learning, and loved forests in Houston, you know, and seeing them diminishing, seeing how the development and all the concrete bayous were replacing the forest areas, you know, and how the engineering solutions, we saw the engineering solutions in Houston weren’t working very good when we could see the turds and the rubbers floating on the bayou, you know, that we’d swim in because that was the only place to swim.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:49:11] As opposed to Barton Springs or Barton Creek and when it’s flowing, it used to flow a lot, Barton Creek in the ’90s and it was just amazing how beautiful it was compared to the bayous I was used to swimming with in Houston, you know?

 

David Todd [01:49:27] Very different.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:49:28] Engineering designed, you now, so.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:49:32] And so it led me a lot, too, on how to help Austin from becoming, again, like Houston was.

 

David Todd [01:49:44] Well, we covered a lot of ground and I wanted to say thank you. But you’ve been very agreeable with me peppering you with questions. I was wondering if there’s anything you might like to add before we wrap up and let you go on about your day.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:50:01] No, I’ll send you a couple of articles I mentioned to you. And if you’re interested in them, one of them is the Kerr County Lead article they cite me in about the flooding there and contributing. I’ll send you an article by Char Miller about the flood in San Antonio in 1921.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:50:21] Yeah, if you are interested, I did a recent report about wastewater irrigation and disasters of it, because Austin’s trying to bring that back to save water, by the way. They’re requiring some developments to do wastewater irrigation, treated wastewater irrigation. But there doesn’t seem to be anyhing that you have to monitor or any sensitivity about caves nearby or we chart zone or anything like that. So, it’s kind of interesting that Austin Water is going that way, assuming that it’s going to be fine.

 

David Todd [01:50:58] I guess we were always learning and relearning and forgetting and remembering.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:51:06] Yes.

 

David Todd [01:51:06] Well, thanks for recalling all this good stuff and sharing it with us. I really appreciate your help and interest and wanted to thank you.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:51:16] Yeah, well, thank you, David.

 

David Todd [01:51:18] You bet. Well, I see we are recording. Let me turn this off.

 

Nico Hauwert [01:51:24] OK.

 

David Todd [01:51:24] And then if there’s anything you wanted to mention before we go, we can do that.