Nine years ago, Phase 2 of the Mary Rhodes Pipeline went online. At a cost of $126 million, it promised to deliver over 30 million gallons a day of water to the Coastal Bend from the Colorado River, over 100 miles away. But since 2017, that water supply has only delivered 33% of its capacity, according to data from the Texas Water Development Board — resulting in a 60 billion gallon shortfall that ultimately had to be drawn from our western reservoirs, Lake Corpus Christi and Choke Canyon.
What’s strange about this is that throughout the entire nine-year period, Corpus Christi Water has spent most of its energy developing a new water supply, the Inner Harbor seawater desalination plant, that has been planned to deliver a similar amount of water as Mary Rhodes Phase 2, but at a cost almost 10 times as much — $1.2 billion.
Now Coastal Bend residents are rightly upset, because had CCW prioritized maximizing our existing water supplies instead of focusing solely on the Inner Harbor project, we wouldn’t be in Stage 3 drought restrictions. Our reservoir storage levels would be higher than what they were a year ago, and they wouldn’t be two years away from running dry. Yet here we are, with signs all over town warning that “every drop counts.”…