I’ve written about a slow-moving water crisis in Corpus Christi, Texas—rooted in the city’s failure to build a desalination plant—since 2022 when I joined Inside Climate News. This March, I traveled to Corpus Christi to again report on what the city’s own website was calling an upcoming “water emergency.”
Within days, I realized there were no preparations underway to manage the potential emergency. City leaders wouldn’t acknowledge the scale of the problem. Through a week of intensive reporting, using sources I’d built over years, I drew a dire picture at odds with the city’s own projections. It set off a firestorm.
Two days after publication, a KXAN reporter asked Gov. Greg Abbott about my report, and the governor appeared angry—not at me but at the city’s leaders. Corpus Christi had squandered state loans and failed to grow its water supply, he said. He threatened to take over the city if it didn’t find a way to avoid a potential catastrophe.
Over the next few days, a state senator called an emergency meeting, city council members introduced a petition to impeach the mayor, and the mayor, in a Facebook post, called all citizens to an emergency meeting to re-authorize the city’s seawater desalination project.
I drove to the tiny town of Edna the next week and reported that the water shortage could be just weeks away due to conservation protocols set by the Lavaca-Navidad River Authority, which oversees a reservoir for the region. The next day, Gov. Abbott waived those protocols with an emergency decree and ordered emergency temporary permits for Corpus Christi’s groundwater projects.
That evening, at a Corpus Christi City Council meeting, the city’s water department released new modeling that revealed a timeline for possible reservoir depletion—and it was even more dire than what I’d reported. All of Texas was now talking about Corpus Christi.
On March 20, I joined the Texas Standard, a statewide public radio news show, for a special live broadcast about Corpus Christi’s “water crisis that…could be a historic emergency.”
Host David Brown put it this way:
“Unless you lived here or had connections here, you, like many other Texans, had only a vague idea about the pressures facing this city when it comes to water… But about two weeks ago, a story reported by Dylan Baddour of Inside Climate News sounded a loud alarm bell heard state wide.”
Several days later, the story was on CNN.
The stakes couldn’t be higher for people who live in Corpus Christi and ICN’s local reporting made a difference—to the quick-acting governor, to the Texas media that spread the word, to the public that demanded the local authorities ensure their vital water supply. We will continue to follow the story.
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