Even in its frontier days, when it was a camp for General Zachary Taylor’s forces defending the border of newly annexed Texas, there was barely enough water in Corpus Christi to go around. The Tejanos, Americanos, and old Spanish ranchers crazy (or unlucky) enough to settle on the edge of this growing empire survived by drinking from arroyos, cisterns, and foul, sulphuric wells. The native Karankawa people lived nomadically to avoid straining the region’s streams, springs, and shallow groundwater resources.
You can follow Corpus’ subsequent history through the twists and turns of what historian Alan Lessoff calls the “endless search for a larger and more adequate water supply” in his book Where Texas Meets the Sea: Corpus Christi and Its History — the damming of local rivers, the failure of those dams, massive Depression-era reservoir projects, groundwater running dry, the consolidation of regional water districts, an expensive project to pipe in fresh water from 100 miles away, an even more expensive project to produce it on the spot. Take your pick of cities west of the 98th meridian: Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles. They’ve all followed similar beats.
But Corpus — never a superlative city, a chip on its shoulder that goes back to Taylor’s time — is now close to the inglorious distinction of becoming the first American metropolis to run out of water. Though it’s located on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, its fresh water reservoirs sit at less than 10% of their total capacity; Day Zero will arrive in November unless there’s 20 to 30 inches of rainfall before then. Those are hurricane numbers, an unsettling thing upon which to hang one’s hope…