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A massive drought coupled with political mismanagement might fully deplete water in a major city: neither in West Asia nor the Horn of Africa, but in the United States of America.
According to Inside Climate News, the city of Corpus Christi, Texas could soon completely out of water in the next year. It’s the eighth largest city in Texas, and a major industrial node in the Gulf Coast. Its water infrastructure provides access to over 500,000 Texans, as well as the major chemical plants, oil facilities, and plastics factories which call the Gulf region home.
As Climate News notes, Corpus Christi is on track to be the first American city to completely run out of water, as its reservoirs near empty following a five-year drought. Though nobody can snap their fingers and end a drought, the extremely dry conditions follow decades of warnings that South Texas is posed for a water crisis.
Earlier this week, city manager Peter Zanoni announced Corpus Christi will be forced to cut overall water consumption by 25 percent — nearly 16 million gallons a day — as soon as September. “We have no precedent to follow. There’s no manual, there’s no video,” Zanoni told the city council.
Details are hazy on how the city plans to make those cuts, but the impacts could be massive, as schools, hospitals, and homeowners are forced to do without — to say nothing of commercial and industrial business.
“We don’t have enough information from the city to make a statement on how we would proceed or how this would affect our business,” a spokesperson for H-E-B, the company operating the largest bakery in Corpus Christi, told Climate News.
Climate scientists have been warning about the consequences of poor water stewardship for years at this point. As Shannon Marquez, a professor at the Columbia Water Center told climate publication Grist, Corpus Christi could just be the first domino to fall as corporate water use and climate change take their toll on water tables across the country.
“What we’re seeing in Corpus Christi is really not an isolated crisis,” Marquez said. “It’s very consistent with how things are going to unfold if we don’t start to plan.”
More on climate change: Earth on Track to Become Uninhabitable, Scientists Say
