Checking in on Corpus Christi and it surrounding areas.
Dwindling levels in this region’s main reservoirs have triggered a rush on local aquifers as cities, towns, chemical plants and ranchers drill for water.
The nearby city of Corpus Christi faces a looming catastrophe from the imminent depletion of water supplies that sustain 500,000 people and one of Texas’s main industrial complexes. Recent emergency groundwater projects have pushed off the timeline to disaster by months, officials said last week. But locals fear they may threaten the water supplies of rural towns and residents who have historically relied on their own small wells.
“People like me are probably gonna be running out of water,” said Bruce Mumme, a retired chemical plant worker who lives on family land in rural Jim Wells County, about 40 miles outside Corpus Christi. “Then this property and house is useless.”
Dust covers the fields where hay for Mumme’s cattle should grow. His catfish are about to die as the last of their pond evaporates. Sand dunes have started to form. He’s roamed this land since he was a boy and he’s never seen sand dunes.
“Without water we can’t even live out here,” he said as he drove dirt roads of the land his grandfather bought. “You can’t feed cows bottled water.”
Last fall, after the city of Corpus Christi first began pumping millions of gallons per day from the Evangeline Aquifer, towns and landowners across this area saw water levels in their wells drop. Mumme lost access to water for three days while he waited for workers to come lower his pump, which he said cost thousands of dollars. After that experience, he paid $30,000 to add another well on his property, for backup.
He’s not the only one. The region’s largest industrial water users are also drilling wells, according to officials. In Nueces County, where Corpus Christi is located, newly planned pumping projects alone could add up to over 1,000 percent of what the state water plan considers a sustainable rate of withdrawal from aquifers.
In March, Corpus Christi began pumping millions more gallons per day from its wellfield on the western banks of the Nueces River, about 15 miles outside the city, after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott waived permitting processes for the project in a bid to avert a water shortage. Across the river, drill rigs are turning at the city’s eastern wellfield.
“I’ve done a lot of big projects in my career,” said Rik Allbritton, an operations manager for Weisinger Inc. with 40 years drilling experience, as a rig roared behind him at the eastern wellfield last Tuesday. “This is on the bigger side.”
These two projects, each containing clusters of several large water wells, aim to pump tens of millions of gallons per day in coming months. More than 20 miles away, in San Patricio County, piping has arrived for a third wellfield. A fourth and fifth are also in the queue along the Nueces River.
The region’s largest water user, a massive, new plastics plant operated by ExxonMobil and the Saudi state oil company, also drilled test wells recently but found water that was too salty to use, according to Corpus Christi city manager Peter Zanoni.
“They continue to look for alternative water sources,” Zanoni said in an interview. “Several of the big companies are doing that, and the choice is really just groundwater.”
[…]
Many factors contributed to this situation. Five consecutive years of record heat and drought have dried up the region’s reservoirs, while large-scale pumping of the state’s inland aquifers has killed springs that used to feed local tributaries.
Miller attributes the predicament primarily to poor planning. In the last 15 years, this region welcomed a spate of downstream industrial projects, including massive petrochemical plants by Exxon and Occidental Chemical, as well as expansions at Valero and Flint Hills refineries.
While those and other projects came online, the city tried fruitlessly to develop designs for a seawater desalination plant, which Miller considered ill-conceived.
“We did not simultaneously add new water supply,” Miller said. “We thought everything was going to be OK. But it was not going to be OK. And we should have known better.”
By all accounts, leaders in Texas watched this crisis approach for generations. Now the plight of Corpus Christi might await other parts of the state, according to Larry Soward, a former commissioner of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Soward joined the Texas Water Quality Board as a staff attorney in 1975, became executive director of the Texas Water Commission in the 1980s and served as chief counsel on water for Agriculture Commissioner Rick Perry in the 1990s. All along, he said, everyone knew Texas was on course to outgrow its water supply.
The state hasn’t been able to build new reservoirs since the 1960s. As water demand crept upwards through the decades, no comprehensive plans to keep up emerged.
The crisis in Corpus Christi, he said, “seems like a ready-shoot-aim type thing.”
“The reasons this floundered is the same reason that a lot of water issues in Texas have floundered,” Soward said. “There’s been a lack of realistic planning.”
See here, here, and here for the background. We have indeed been talking about this for awhile – see this post from 2012 for an example. Maybe this time will be different, maybe this time there will be some careful long-term planning in addition to whatever expedient short-term solutions get enacted. Not where I’d put my money, but it sure does sound bad this time. Maybe we’ll get that big storm and that will help out. You never know.
“newly planned pumping projects alone could add up to over 1,000 percent of what the state water plan considers a sustainable rate”
my 2¢ (do we have to round that up to a nickel now? Last Penny, Nov 18)
Inside Climate News should consider a style-guide that prefers “10 times” over “1,000 percent”, which is only useful in making the innumerate confused.