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WATER POLITICS

Via Invisible Waters, a look at Corpus Christi’s drought crisis:

“We have no precedent to follow. There’s no manual, there’s no video,” Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Zanoni told the City Council…”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been watching the news out of Corpus Christi in South Texas (the state’s eighth largest metro area), where years of extreme drought have left combined storage in the main reservoirs at under 8% of capacity. The city, which serves water to about 318,000 residents, petrochemical plants, and nearby towns, is months away from declaring an emergency and cutting water 25% across the board, with implications for households (already under tight restrictions and banned from watering lawns), schools, hospitals, and the economy.

There are many questions about how these curtailments would be enforced. Local reporters for Inside Climate News and the Texas Tribune have helped unravel the story, the decisions that led to the crisis, and the scramble to quickly bring on new supply, including with a private desalinization plant and groundwater pumping that would mine aquifers far in excess of what is considered a safe yield.

Without any rain and assuming an increase in groundwater pumping and reduced demand due to reclaimed reuse, the city forecasts a gap between total water use (the blue line) and supply shown in the bar charts, beginning around April of next year.

It’s a story, as Grist notes, that may offer a cautionary look into the future. And it’s also one about past decisions and present water stress, water planning and priorities in a crisis: The cost of finding new water supplies, investing in infrastructure, and whose use is safeguarded first when there is no longer enough supply to go around.

To that final point, industrial facilities like plastics plants and refineries account for more than half of the demand. They will be subject to a curtailment under a water emergency, but how cuts are distributed and who pays will be important to watch.

“The city needs to tell industry: we need to give our people water,” one resident told the Texas Tribune in March. “They’re getting water first, and we’re second.”