SPICEWOOD, Texas — Two tanker trucks for the first time delivered thousands of gallons of water Monday to a Texas town that came precariously close to becoming the state’s first community to run out of water during a historic drought.

The 8,000-gallon water delivery arrived in Spicewood after it became clear the village’s wells could no longer produce enough water to meet the needs of the Lake Travis community’s 1,100 residents and elementary school, said Clara Tuma, spokeswoman for the Lower Colorado River Authority.

Several towns and villages in Texas have come close to running out of water during the driest year in Lone Star State history, but until now none has had to truck in water. Most found solutions to hold them over, often paying tens of thousands of dollars to avoid hauling water, a scenario that conjures up images from the early 1900s, when indoor plumbing was a novelty.

In reality, water still ran Monday through pipes and faucets of the central Texas town, although the source will soon be different. Instead of being pumped from wells into the community’s 129,000-gallon storage tank – a two days’ supply of water – the already treated liquid will be hauled in from 17 miles away, treated a second time and put into the town’s water system.

“The hauling of water is just a Band-Aid approach. It’s just a short-term approach,” said Joe Don Dockery, a Burnet County commissioner who oversees the Spicewood area.

Ryan Rowney, manager of water operations for the LCRA, said the agency plans to truck water into Spicewood for several more weeks while exploring alternatives, including drilling a new well or piping water from nearby Lake Travis. But the agency doesn’t want to rush into any project, and prefers for now to pay $200 per truckload of water while ensuring the tens of thousands of dollars it will cost to find a permanent solution are well-spent.

“If we need to haul every day, we will. This will probably go on for several more months,” Rowney said.

For more than a year, nearly the entire state of Texas has been in some stage of severe or exceptional drought. Rain has been so scarce that lakes across the state turned into pools of mud.