Texas Drought & Water Restrictions: Edwards Aquifer stages + TCEQ restricted water systems

One scheduled run answers the question: which Texas water systems are restricting water use right now, and what stage is the Edwards Aquifer in? The actor merges two public sources that normally live on separate sites in different formats, normalizes them into clean typed JSON, CSV, or Excel, and filters them down to the counties, system sizes, and stages you care about. It's built for daily monitoring by irrigation, landscaping, pool, car-wash, ag, and industrial operators, by local newsrooms, and by dashboards.

What you get

record_type	What it is	Key fields
eaa_pool_stage	Official Critical Period stage for the San Antonio and Uvalde pools	stage, stage_number, pumping_reduction_pct, source_updated
eaa_site_reading	J-17 and J-27 index wells (ft amsl); Comal and San Marcos springflow (cfs)	today, yesterday, ten_day_avg (+ six_months_ago, one_year_ago, historical_monthly_avg, diff_from_historical when detailedHistory is on)
tceq_restricted_pws	Public water systems that reported water-use restrictions to TCEQ	pws_id, pws_name, county, date_notified, tceq_stage, tceq_stage_number, priority, population, report_generated
tceq_no_match	Emitted when your filters match no systems, so a scheduled run never looks broken	note

Input

Field	Default	Meaning
includeEdwardsAquifer	true	Edwards Aquifer stages and readings
includeTceqRestrictions	true	TCEQ restricted-system list
counties	[]	e.g. ["Bexar","Travis"]; empty means statewide
minPopulation	0	Keep only systems serving at least this many people
minTceqStage	0	e.g. 2 keeps only systems at stage 2 or higher
detailedHistory	false	Adds historical comparisons. Fetches a large (about 26 MB) EAA page, so leave it off for daily runs
maxItems	0	Cap on output items
requestDelaySecs	2	Politeness delay between requests

Example (Central Texas, stage 2+): {"includeEdwardsAquifer": false, "counties": ["Bexar","Travis","Hays","Comal"], "minTceqStage": 2} returned 15 systems on 2026-11-04.

Data sources & credit

Legal status (Scout review, 2026-11-04): CLEAR WITH CONDITIONS. Pricing is based on the automation this actor adds, not on access to TCEQ data. TCEQ and EAA are credited, no logos are used, and the disclaimer below applies.

• Source: Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). List of Texas PWSs Limiting Water Use to Avoid Shortages. The complete raw list is free to view at that link. The Data Dictionary on that page explains the stage and priority codes. Systems self-report their entries, and TCEQ regenerates the report periodically (see report_generated).
• Source: Edwards Aquifer Authority (EAA). edwardsaquifer.org (current stage and readings) and the EAA Environmental Data Portal: Aquifer Conditions. Free to view. EAA marks all readings as provisional and subject to revision. We use EAA data only, never EAA images.
• What you pay for is the automation layer: fetching and merging both sources, parsing them into typed fields, county, population, and stage filters, and delivery on your schedule through Apify integrations (webhooks, Sheets, Slack, and so on). The underlying public data stays free at the links above.
• This actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an official product of TCEQ or EAA. No agency logos are used.

Pricing (pay-per-event, suggested)

Event	Price	Notes
apify-actor-start	$0.005 per run
result	$0.001 per item	You pay only for the rows left after your filters. A full statewide run (about 184 items) costs about $0.19; a filtered county watch (about 6–20 items) costs about $0.01–0.03
(planned) stage-change-alert	$0.02	Emitted only when an EAA or TCEQ stage changes compared with your previous run

A daily full run costs about $5.70/month; a daily county watch costs about $0.50/month.

Etiquette

3–4 requests per run, sent one at a time with a 2 s minimum gap. The actor checks robots.txt, identifies itself honestly (TexasDroughtActor/0.2), and backs off for a long time on 403 or 429. Please don't schedule it more than a few times a day, because the sources update daily (EAA) or less often (TCEQ).

Disclaimer

Data is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, including accuracy, completeness, or timeliness. It is not an official source. TCEQ makes no warranty on the information on its site. The TCEQ list is self-reported by water systems, and EAA data is provisional. Always confirm current restrictions with your water utility, TCEQ, or EAA before you make any operational, legal, or financial decision. If a source changes or is unavailable, the run still returns whatever other sources succeeded and lists the problem in the RUN_SUMMARY key-value record.

Run locally (developers)

python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt jsonschema
.venv/bin/python validate.py      # runs with test_input.json, validates, writes sample_output/