The Midweek #61: South Texas Is Running Dry. Are We Next?
Welcome to the newly launched weekly newsletter of the bigcitysmalltown podcast. Monday Musings is now being published as The Midweek every Wednesday morning. Why change? Because life is hard enough without a weekend deadline for myself or the BCST producer Cory Ames.
We often hear from our subscribers with suggested podcast guests and newsletter topics. Keep your ideas coming. Meanwhile, as San Antonio and the region get ready for the long, hot season we call “summer” that can start in May and continue through October, I have water on my mind.
You should have water on your mind, too.
Credit to city leaders who have worked over the last 40 years to conserve water we draw from the Edwards Aquifer and to diversify our sources of water. San Antonio now relies on alternative water sources for about half its drinking water.
More needs to be done, The Austin-San Antonio corridor is one of the fastest growing urban areas in the country. The more people and businesses that come, the more water we need. Growth is inevitable, but how we plan for it will determine whether that growth generates opportunity and more shared prosperity, or whether the challenges that come with that growth are ignored at our own peril.
About 75% of Texas is in drought, and South Texas is among the hardest hit regions with severe to exceptional drought, despite the recent rains. It would take 2-3 feet of rain to fill our lakes, replenish the aquifer, and meaningfully ease the drought conditions gripping the region — and as far as anyone can tell, that's not on the near-term horizon.
We will go from a 40% reduction to a 30% reduction in pumping if we move from Stage 4 to Stage 3 water restrictions, as is likely. I favor remaining in Stage 4, and not sending anyone signals that it’s okay to use more water than is absolutely essential.
San Antonio is in far better shape than coastal cities like Corpus Christi, which is in real danger of running out of water in the coming months. Lake Corpus Christi and the Choke Canyon Reservoir are at less than 10% capacity. In the Rio Grande Valley, cities like Brownsville, McAllen, Harlingen, and farther west along the border, Laredo, all face their own acute water shortages, with little capacity for storage and reliance on the Rio Grande, which makes those cities vulnerable to upstream consumption and perpetual water allocation disputes with Mexico.
Gulf of Mexico desalination plants are planned for the coastal region, but they will not come online in time to address the immediate needs of some two million people in the region.
It’s worth noting here for people new to our city or too young to recall past events, the essential, forward-thinking steps that San Antonio Water System (SAWS) officials and other city leaders have taken over the last four decades or so to diversify the metro area’s water supply and institute new levels of water conservation.
- Creation of the “purple pipe” recycled water distribution system in 1996-98, which reached its full operational size in 2000. This water is used for industrial manufacturing use, cooling towers, the Paseo del Rio, irrigation and golf course maintenance.
- Aquifer Storage & Recovery injection wells (ASR), which was authorized in 1996 and became operational in 2004. Significant quantities of Edwards water that SAWS pumps but does not immediately need is injected into the ASR wells in south Bexar County. Consider it a 'rainy day' savings account — though in this case, it only gets drawn down when it isn't raining.
- The city’s brackish groundwater desalination plant was built between 2012-2014 and came online in 2016. The so-called H2Oaks facility produces about 12 million gallons of potable water per day, drawing brackish water from the shallow, saline groundwater in south Bexar County.
- The SAWS headquarters once featured a giant commode in its lobby, a reminder that the water utility installed tens of thousands of water-saving commodes here between 1990-2000 at no cost to ratepayers. The effect was profound, with per capita water usage reduced so much that our city now consumes about the same amount of water that it did when the population was half its current size.
- The Vista Ridge Pipeline that transports 50,000 acre feet of water annually from Burleson County to Bexar County. The pipeline was constructed from 2015-2019, and the system became operational in 2020.
Compare our water utility’s profile to any other in the state and you will realize how forward-thinking leadership has been over the decades. Yet almost every one of the steps cited above was met with some opposition.
What can you do to make a difference? Plenty. Pay attention to your monthly water consumption and compare your usage to the median household usage. If your home includes a yard, eliminate non-native species, particularly lawn turf that requires abundant watering, plant native pollinators, and move from an automatic irrigation system to weekly hand-watering.
I’ll close by noting that the influx of water-thirsty data centers powering artificial intelligence technology will only increase pressure on the demand side. We would be wise to have a community conversation about the coming growth and how we intend to meet it.
That’s the focus of The Austin-San Antonio Megaregion: Opportunity & Challenge in the Lone Star State, the book authored by former San Antonio Mayor and Housing & Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, David Hendricks, and yours truly. The book is a call to action, asking state and local leaders to address growth in a more comprehensive, proactive way. If you care about such public policy issues, and you should, we hope you’ll pick up a copy and join the conversation.
Host, bigcitysmalltown
Robert “Bob” Rivard is a veteran American journalist whose 46-year career has taken him across Texas, Latin America, and beyond. He co-founded the Rivard Report (later named the San Antonio Report) with his wife, Monika Maeckle, in 2012, building it into the city’s leading nonprofit news organization before retiring in 2022.
Bob has worked for five Texas newspapers, beginning his career on the border at the Brownsville Herald, then moving to the Corpus Christi Caller, the Dallas Times-Herald, and later serving as a foreign correspondent and chief of correspondents for Newsweek. He returned to Texas as senior editor of the San Antonio Light before becoming executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News (1997–2011).
His journalism has earned widespread recognition, including being named Editor & Publisher’s “Editor of the Year” in 2000 and receiving the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia University for his reporting on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border.
He is the author of Trail of Feathers, a nonfiction book chronicling the disappearance and murder of journalist Philip True in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. The book, published by Public Affairs in 2005, was widely reviewed, excerpted in Esquire, and selected by People magazine as one of five recommended nonfiction works that year.
Bob now hosts bigcitysmalltown, a podcast featuring the people shaping San Antonio’s future. He and Monika live in Southtown, where she runs the Texas Butterfly Ranch blog and previously founded the annual San Antonio Monarch Butterfly and Pol…Read More
