Even under such dire circumstances, it is unlikely that the millions of people who depend on the Colorado River will see Day Zero, when municipal water supplies run out. No city in the US has achieved this level.
However, there is a region that may be getting closer to this type of disaster. Officials in Corpus Christi, Texas’ eighth-largest city, said last week that the city would reach a drought emergency level by September – defined as 180 days of demand for water exceeding supply. Some forecasts say that unless major weather patterns produce more rainfall, city water sources could desiccated up by next year.
Residents of Corpus Christi are already subject to water utilize restrictions, including: limits watering lawns and washing cars. Water bills in apartments too increased this year by an average of just under $5. Municipal authorities he said that industrial customers will be asked to reduce consumption by 25 percent in September.
“We don’t want to ruin our economy,” Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Canone told NBC News of the decision to wait until September to declare a Level 1 drought emergency, which would force industrial customers to limit their utilize. “We don’t want to close down the business.”
Corpus Christi’s water supply comes mainly from surface sources. Two of the most vital local sources – Choke Canyon Reservoir AND Corpus Christi Lake— have reached critically low levels over the past few years due to the drought that has hit the region. On Tuesday, their levels were 7.4% and 8.7%, respectively.
Many of the city’s problems stem from industrial water utilize. According to data, Corpus Christi is a major petrochemical hub and the largest industrial water consumer in the region permit statistics acquired by InsideClimate News, is a joint plastics plant between ExxonMobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation. From 2022 to 2024, the plant used an average of 13.5 million gallons of water per day. Average individual customer according to the cityuses 6,000 gallons per month. (ExxonMobil did not return a request for comment.)
The city was considering building a desalination plant to supply water to industrial customers, including the Exxon plant started working in 2022 – for years. However, the potential costs of the project rose to over $1 billion, and residents expressed concerns about the plant’s environmental impact. Last year, regulators voted to approve the project even though there was no water contingency plan in place. On Wednesday, the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office did so negative Corpus Christi, additional funding for a separate desalination installation.
“A few lessons to be learned from this situation that are important for many cities, particularly in the Southwest, is that water infrastructure projects are becoming more and more expensive over time,” says Shane Walker, director of the Center for Water and Environmental Studies at Texas Tech University. “If you think you can wait and get a cheaper bid on a water infrastructure project, the opposite is probably true.”