This Summer, the American Water Crisis Becomes Real

Two high-profile water crises, juiced up by climate change and industrial overuse, are building in the US. From a city in Texas staring down a drought emergency to a decades-long political crisis coming to a head for the states that rely on the Colorado River, water issues in the West will take center stage this summer—and experts tell WIRED that other places should take notes and start planning ahead for their own future.

In February, following a winter of record-breaking heat, snowpack in various mountain ranges across the American West reached record lows. March came in even hotter, smashing records in states across the region.

“What happened in March was unprecedented, and stunning, and disturbing, and out of this world, frankly—we had temperatures the likes of which we have never seen and couldn't have happened without human-caused climate change,” says Brad Udall, a senior water and climate researcher at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center. “We had a crummy snowpack that went from crummy to god-awful in three weeks.”

This snowmelt crisis is having dire impacts on the Colorado River, one of the most crucial water sources in the West, which provides water for 40 million people across seven states. River flow in some areas on the Colorado had slowed to a trickle last week, thanks to the early snowmelt this year.

The Colorado River isn’t just a crucial water supply: It also provides power for more than 25 million people through dams at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the country. Low water levels in those reservoirs spell trouble for electricity generation. As of Tuesday morning, Lake Mead was sitting at just 17 feet above its record low level, set in July of 2022.

This record dry season is also colliding with a decades-long political crisis on the Colorado River. For years, the states drawing water from the river have sparred over how to equitably divide the supply from the river, as the growth of agriculture and a series of climate-charged droughts have begun threatening the long-term water supply. Alfalfa for cattle feed is the biggest consumer of water from the Colorado, using more water than all of the cities along the river combined. States have missed key deadlines, including one in February, to renegotiate the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which regulates how water in the region is distributed. Each state gets an annual allotment, and the total amount of water is supposed to be divided evenly between an upper basin and a lower basin.

Earlier this month, following dire projections for the summer, the US Interior Department stepped in, announcing a series of actions intended to keep hydropower at Lake Powell running. The government acknowledges that this could lessen hydropower at Lake Mead as well as water availability in states along the lower part of the river.

With all this chaos, there’s a chance, Udall says, that this season’s scarce water could cause a historic first in the next few years: States in the upper basin of the river could fail to deliver enough water to states in the lower basin, violating the 1922 agreement for the first time. This could trigger a potential lawsuit between states.

“What's frustrating to somebody like myself is this is all foreseeable,” says Udall. “Those of us who are kind of in the know, and that includes a lot of people in the Colorado River Basin, have seen something like this coming for a long, long time.”

Even with this dire set of circumstances, it’s unlikely that the millions of people who rely on the Colorado River will reach Day Zero, the term for when municipal water sources run dry. No US city has ever gotten to that point.

However, there’s a region that could be inching closer to this kind of catastrophe. Officials in Corpus Christi, the eighth-largest city in Texas, said last week that the city is set to reach a Level 1 drought emergency—what it defines as 180 days of water demand outpacing supply—by September. Some projections say that, barring major weather patterns that bring more rain, municipal water sources could run dry by next year.

People living in Corpus Christi are already under restrictions for their water use, including limits on lawn watering and car washing. Residential water bills also increased by an average of just under $5 this year. City officials said that industrial customers would be asked to cut use by 25 percent in September.

“We don’t want to wreck our economy,” Corpus Christi city manager Peter Canone told NBC News of the decision to wait until September to declare a Level 1 drought emergency, which would force those industrial customers to curb their use. “We don’t want to have operations close down.”

Corpus Christi’s water supplies come overwhelmingly from surface water sources. (One important secondary source is the Colorado River; water is piped into Corpus Christi via a 100-mile pipeline.) Two of the most important local sources—the Choke Canyon Reservoir and Lake Corpus Christi—have reached critically low levels over the past few years as drought has gripped the region. As of Tuesday, they were sitting at 7.4 percent full and 8.7 percent full, respectively.

Many of the city’s problems stem from industrial water use. Corpus Christi is a major petrochemical hub, and the largest industrial consumer of water in the area, according to permit statistics obtained by InsideClimate News, is a joint ExxonMobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation plastics plant. The plant used an average of 13.5 million gallons of water each day between 2022 and 2024. The average residential customer, according to the city, uses 6,000 gallons per month. (ExxonMobil did not return a request for comment.)

The city has discussed building a desalination plant to provide water to its industrial customers—including the Exxon plant, which began operating in 2022—for years. But the project’s potential costs ballooned to more than $1 billion, while residents expressed concerns about the ecological impacts the plant could have. Last year, regulators voted to pass on the project, with no backup plan for water supply in place. On Wednesday, the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas governor Greg Abbott’s office had denied Corpus Christi additional funding for a separate desalination plant.

“Some lessons to learn from this situation that are important for a lot of cities, especially in the Southwest, is that water infrastructure projects are getting more expensive with time,” says Shane Walker, director of the Water and the Environment Research Center at Texas Tech University. “If you think you can wait around and get a cheaper deal on a water infrastructure project, it's probably the opposite.”

This push and pull between attracting business and what a city can maintain water-wise, Walker says, is a common tension for city planners. As more cities in Texas see population growth—and struggle with planning out their water needs—more of them need to be thinking much farther ahead.

“You have to think of a 20-year time horizon as urgent,” Walker says. “If you're relying on groundwater—groundwater is a finite resource. Lakes are vulnerable to drought. What’s your alternative supply?”

There could be some short- and medium-term relief for both Corpus Christi and the Colorado River. At a water update briefing last week, Canone said that recent rains had been “beneficial” to the region, helping to boost water levels in Lake Texana, another water source for the city. Udall says that recent wet weather has also helped stabilize some conditions out West. And the upcoming El Niño phenomenon—forecast to be one of the most intense El Niños on record—could bring a heavy monsoon season to the West this summer.

But both the municipal situation in Corpus Christi and the regional crisis for the Colorado river have specific similarities: a lack of attention to a slow-building problems, exacerbated by industrial use. Climate change is pushing water crises like these to the forefront.