No modern American city has ever run out of water. But chances are rising that Corpus Christi could be the first. Absent a biblical rainfall event, its reservoirs are on track to completely dry up by next year.
That raises baffling questions for the future of Texas’ eighth-largest city and one of the nation’s major petrochemical hubs.
“We have no precedent to follow. There’s no manual, there’s no video,” Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Zanoni told the City Council in March, when local leaders first acknowledged that disaster could be imminent.
This week, Zanoni announced that Corpus Christi will require 25% cuts to water usage across the board in September. But at a City Council meeting on Tuesday, officials appeared deeply uncomfortable with exploring the details of how life in Corpus Christi might look under these conditions — and whether such ambitious conservation targets were even possible.
“It’s not going to be pretty,” said City Council Member Carolyn Vaughn, a co-owner of an oilfield services company, at the meeting Tuesday. “Everybody’s going to have to make sacrifices.”
The city of Corpus Christi doesn’t just provide water to 500,000 residents of the city and nearby towns. The rest of its water consumption — more than half of it, in fact — comes from the multi-billion dollar chemical plants, refineries and other industrial facilities operated by some of the biggest companies in the world. And those companies — including ExxonMobil, Valero and Occidental — have not publicly explained how, or if, they will implement such steep water cuts this fall.
So what does all this mean for Corpus Christi residents and beyond? Here’s what we know, and don’t know.
Could households lose access to water?
Not immediately. Residents haven’t been allowed to water their lawns since 2023, and city data released Tuesday made clear: The people have been squeezed for all they can give.
Officials said about 70% of homes in the city already use less water than restrictions will require. The rest, about 27,000 households, would face fees for overconsumption and eventually have their water shut off under current plans.
During a City Council meeting on Tuesday, though, Mayor Paulette Guajardo balked at that proposal.
“I could never support that, to turn someone’s water off,” she said. She suggested making the household water cuts voluntary instead of mandatory.
How will this affect schools?
No one knows for sure. During a meeting last month covered by KRIS TV, the city’s fire chief, Brandon Wade, floated some disturbing scenarios.
“Do we just call school closed?” Wade said. “Do we have bottled water? Or two pallets of water per school and we can hand some out?”
On Tuesday a spokesperson for Corpus Christi Independent School District, which serves 33,000 students, told us the district does not expect to cancel classes in a water emergency.
“Our working families rely on us to provide a safe learning environment as well as free breakfast and lunch,” Leanne Libby wrote in an email. “While we share the community’s concern regarding water, we do not plan to move to a virtual format.”
However, the spokesperson said, “additional water restrictions may come with increased financial burdens,” adding that the district is seeking permits to drill three water wells — two at middle schools and one at a sports complex.
One of the top uses of water in schools is sports field irrigation, which has already been banned. Another top use that might be hard to cut back on, though, is toilet flushing.
How will emergency water rules be enforced?
Plans presented Tuesday would formally prohibit watering lawns, washing cars and filling residential swimming pools. The plans proposed a $500 fine and misdemeanor for a first violation and suspension of water service for a second. Water service could also be suspended for users that exceed their allotted water amount for more than a month.
Guajardo said those plans may change, arguing that such water shutoffs are “just not acceptable.”
What will happen for larger water users is unclear. The city’s presentation indicated that it does plan to charge industrial users, but it also wrote in underlined lettering that “Legal will need to be consulted.”
Corpus Christi plans to adopt its proposal for enforcement rules in the coming weeks but hasn’t indicated exactly when.
How could businesses be affected?
Current plans call for all businesses to cut water use by 25%, but the details and implications of that plan are still being worked out.
“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,” said a spokesperson for H-E-B, which operates its largest bakery in Corpus Christi, supplying bread and tortillas to grocery stores across Texas. “They are also still working offline to discuss the potential effects for commercial businesses.”
Restrictions will also affect how much water businesses have available for cleaning floors, washing dishes and cooking. But how they’ll cut back is unclear. The chief operating officer for Corpus Christi’s water utility could not provide estimates on average restaurant water usage when asked by City Council members on Tuesday.
One of the few firm details that the city has proposed is that car washes will be forced to close completely.
What about hospitals?
City leaders indicated they plan to carve exemptions for hospital water use but offered few details. Winkleman said that in some cases it would be “easy” to waive water limits, such as for urgently-needed surgeries, but others would be considered on a case-by-case basis.
“We’re not experts in operating hospitals,” he said. “We need to understand that, and we want them to present the facts to us.”
Corpus Christi’s two hospital districts are also pursuing plans to drill their own wells, though it’s not clear how quickly they could do so.
How will the water emergency affect chemical plants and refineries?
This is the elephant in the room.
Data released Tuesday said the city hoped to shave off 15.7 million gallons per day of water demand by September and expects “0.0” of that to come from residential users. Practically all of it will have to come from the large industrial users like Exxon, Valero, Flint Hills and Occidental Chemical.
While city pools and splash pads consume almost 2 million gallons of water over the course of a summer, a single Exxon plastics plant consumes 13 million gallons per day.
“Industry simply cannot compete long-term without reliable water resources,” said Kara Rivas — a spokesperson for Flint Hills Resources, which supplies jet fuel to Texas airports from its Corpus Christi refinery — at a contentious City Council meeting last year. “This would force the shutdown of at least some aspects of our operations.”
So far, industry representatives haven’t been publicly forthcoming about how the planned reduction would impact their businesses.
“The industry will never reveal their cards,” said Drew Molly, former chief operating officer of Corpus Christi Water, “because it’s highly competitive.”
Molly said companies have been at work for months developing plans to absorb cuts in their water supply. Those plans aren’t public.
“They said it would be tough for them to disclose how they would operate their business if they had to use less water. It’s proprietary information,” Zanoni said in a March 31 interview.
“It’s really none of the city’s business.”
It remains unclear how much authority the city would wield to enforce its water rules on industrial customers.
“There’s going to be a lot of legal opinions, possible litigation,” said Michael Miller, a member of the Corpus Christi Planning Commission.
A water shortage would raise the prospect of layoffs and business closures if companies faced prolonged cuts to production.
But if the water shortage continues to deepen, Corpus Christi would face disastrous economic consequences.
“Without lots and lots of rain, industry will be forced to shut down,” said Don Roach, a former assistant general manager of the San Patricio Municipal Water District, which buys water from Corpus Christi and supplies it to industrial users. “If the industry shuts down, who stays in Corpus without a job? Without industry, what other businesses could exist? This is an unprecedented disaster.”
How long will this emergency last?
The water emergency has no end date. Most likely, it would end if rain refills the region’s reservoirs.
If extreme drought conditions persist, the industrial water users could suck the reservoirs dry in a year. But the city, in theory, would never let it get to that point, experts say. It would likely shut the large spigots to the industrial users and face their lawyers in court before it allowed the 500,000 residents of the Coastal Bend to be left without drinking water.
If shortages continue to deepen, the city could implement rolling blackouts of water availability, shifting its supply to sections of the city at a time.
According to James Dodson, a former regional director of the Corpus Christi water department: “In the worst case scenario, in addition to all the other measures, the City might limit the hours or days water is available, or rotate water availability across the different distribution zones within the City.”
Emergency authorities might also ship in bottled water or filling cisterns by tanker truck.
After that, authorities would oversee managed evacuations, and most residents of Corpus Christi would need to find somewhere else to live. Officials insist that is highly unlikely to happen.
