We may be on the verge of finding out.
The imminent depletion of water supplies in Corpus Christi threatens to cut off the flow of jet fuel to Texas airports and other oil exports from one of the nation’s largest petroleum ports, triggering potential shockwaves through energy markets in Texas and beyond.
Without significant rainfall, Corpus Christi is headed for a “water emergency” within months and total depletion of the system next year, according to the city’s website.
“The impacts are going to be felt tremendously through the state, if not internationally,” said Sean Strawbridge, former CEO of the Port of Corpus Christi Authority, the nation’s top port for crude oil exports, in a 40-minute interview Thursday. “This should be no surprise to anybody. We were talking about this over a decade ago.”
Other current and former officials, alarmed at what they call a lack of preparations, have suggested the potential for an economic crisis involving mass layoffs, disruption of fuel supplies and billions of dollars in emergency spending to avoid an evacuation of the city.
Strawbridge, who now lives in Houston, laid the blame on city leaders, citing “their lack of experience, their lack of knowledge, their lack of recognizing the risks” in a bumbling, decade-long endeavor to build a large seawater desalination plant that would veer the region off its clear course towards calamity.
“They’ve found themselves in quite a dire predicament as a result of those poor decisions,” Strawbridge said. “Time is up.”
A spokesperson for Corpus Christi Mayor Paulette Guajardo declined interview requests, citing “prior commitments,” and did not respond to follow-up questions. City manager Peter Zanoni also did not respond to questions. Instead, Corpus Christi public information manager Robert Gonzales provided an emailed statement.
“The water shortage in the Coastal Bend is the result of a historic five-year drought,” it said. “Currently, the City of Corpus Christi has $1 billion in City Council-approved and funded water projects underway to address our water needs. The City remains committed to ensuring water security for the more than 500,000 residents and our commercial and industrial customers.”
Depletion of this region’s reservoirs would lead to “controlled depression” for the local economy, “mass unemployment” and “industrial total shutdown,” according to a two-page report by Don Roach, former assistant general manager of the San Patricio Municipal Water District, which supplies many of the region’s large industrial water users.
That includes refineries operated by Flint Hills Resources, Valero and Citgo that provide jet fuel to Texas airports and meet much of the state’s daily demand for gasoline.
“This waiting disaster is under the radar for the rest of the state,” said Roach, who worked 20 years at the water district and retired in 2014. “We hear nothing from the Texas politicians about the seriousness of the situation or any state plan to mitigate it.”
He no longer had access to current water data and contracts, he stressed, but produced the report based on his own knowledge. It said the costs of trucking in emergency water “would bankrupt many local small businesses and low-income households” while state emergency managers would need billions of dollars to “build emergency temporary pipelines or subsidize desalination barge rentals to prevent a total evacuation of the city.”
Strawbridge, a former director of the Port of Long Beach, said Roach’s assessment was “spot on.”
Zanoni, the city manager who has overseen Corpus Christi’s descent toward water depletion since 2019 and receives a $400,000 salary, rejected notions of imminent disaster during a press conference Thursday, when Lake Corpus Christi, one of the city’s main reservoirs, dropped below 10 percent. The press conference took place three days after Inside Climate News asked the city for comment about the impending water crisis.
“I think we are going to get through this,” he told TV cameras as he stood before the dwindling remnants of the lake. “We have confidence in what we’re doing. This is no time to panic.”
Zanoni, who holds a master’s of public administration from Florida State University, said the city had “worked tirelessly over the past months to bring everything that we humanly and possibly could to forego what could be this supply and demand issue.”
“Now we’re going to focus, with the City Council and the region, on being prepared in case supply doesn’t meet demand,” he said.
“The best-case scenario, that assumes some level of rain, has this lake here going to about the early fall,” said Zanoni, who indicated that the summer months would give the city enough time to boot up its portfolio of new groundwater water projects..”
James Dodson, a former director of Corpus Christi’s water department who retired this year as a private consultant and was involved in several of those projects, disagreed. He said residents and officials “are crazy not to be panicking.”
“It’s the very worst scenario that I’ve ever seen,” said Dodson, who oversaw a historic expansion of Corpus Christi’s water supply in the 1990s. “It’s going to be an economic disaster.”
For years, he said, the city dismissed repeated opportunities to develop groundwater import projects as it maintained a singular and fruitless focus on desalination. That includes projects that the city only recently scrambled to get started. Dodson doubted any will materialize in time.
“They’ve been kicking the can down the road for a long time and they’ve finally run out of road,” said a current regional water official who requested anonymity to preserve a working relationship with the city. “They’re looking at projects to do that they should have done five, six, seven years ago.”
The last hope to avert disaster, the official said, was a 20- to 30-inch rainfall.
“It would basically have to be a hurricane,” he said.
Emphasis mine.This is a long story and you should read the whole thing, and then wonder what you would do if your city’s water got turned off because there wasn’t any. A big part of the problem in Corpus Christi is that there are many refineries that use the city’s water, and they can’t easily be shut down or ratcheted back. There had been a push for desalinization plants a few years ago to help with the supply, but for a variety of reasons (discussed in the story) they didn’t happen; a recent update on that situation is in this post. What happens next, barring that hurricane they seem to be hoping for, I have no idea. But we’ll find out.
Again, this also (on desal) illustrates the environmental wrongness of Prop 4, which sadly even the Texas Green Party as well as Democrats officially endorsed. More here in my coverage of the Corpus issues https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2026/03/corpus-christi-burns-through-most-its.html