We Can't Keep Ignoring Our Water Crisis

Want to know what Corpus Christi, Puerto Rico, & Prichard, Alabama have in common?

Photo by Luemen Rutkowski on Unsplash

More than 60 percent of Puerto Rico’s clean water never reaches a home. It leaks out of aging pipes on the way there. This year, as the island’s driest summer in more than a century pushed reservoirs to dangerous low levels, about 180,000 homes and businesses lost running water three to four days a week. Officials called it a drought problem.

In a speech this May, Puerto Rico Gov. Jenniffer González acknowledged “serious problems” with the island’s water infrastructure, and that a growing number of communities had reported long stretches with no service.

But Puerto Rico is not alone in its water issues, despite the flashy headlines right now.

That same loss rate shows up nearly 1,600 miles away in Prichard, Alabama, a small city of about 18,000 people outside Mobile where water losses have topped 60 percent systemwide, costing the utility roughly $75,000 a month in treated water that simply vanishes underground.

In May, the state’s environmental agency told advocates that direct loan funding to fix it is “not possible at this time.” Prichard's water system has been under court-appointed receivership since late 2023.

“As a result of years of mismanagement and fiscal irresponsibility, PWWSB’s assets have dissipated and fallen into ruin,” wrote Mobile County Circuit Judge Michael Youngpeter when he put an outside expert in charge of the water system. “This is not a situation where a natural disaster (hurricane, earthquake, etc.) caused immediate and unforeseen damage to the infrastructure of PWWSB, but instead, the dilapidated state of PWWSB’s system is the result of years of poor planning, mismanagement or worse.”

In Corpus Christi, Texas, a similar story is playing out on a different timeline. City officials warned in March that the Gulf Coast region of more than 500,000 people could face unprecedented water restrictions, even as the state-appointed river authority overseeing an estimated $6.4 billion desalination project quietly ran low on money to finish it.

Officials there, too, have pointed first to the weather.

Three places, three very different water systems, and three sets of officials pointing at the sky, at bureaucratic technicalities, or at someone else’s failure. All three crises were substantially built by people, but the weather certainly doesn’t help.

The pattern is one every community should learn to recognize before it’s their turn.

The places with the worst water systems are often the ones least equipped to fix them. Puerto Rico, Prichard, and Corpus Christi all need money on a scale their own tax bases or budgets can't generate.

But state and federal funding programs typically require applicants to prove financial stability, healthy reserves, and a track record of good management before releasing aid, which a struggling water system, almost by definition, doesn't have.

Ask for help and get told you’re not “ready” for it. It's a catch-22 that keeps the worst-off systems worst-off, year after year.

Zoom out, and the scale of the problem gets even clearer.

The American Society of Civil Engineers’ most recent national infrastructure assessment found that aging pipes, more frequent extreme weather, and the rising cost of meeting regulatory standards are all compounding pressure on water systems nationwide. More than half of the country’s public water utilities now identify replacing that aging infrastructure as their single biggest challenge.

The toll of leaving those systems unreplaced is staggering. ASCE estimates the country loses about 33 trillion gallons of treated water a year to aging infrastructure, translating into more than $187 billion in lost revenue.

Corpus Christi, Puerto Rico, and Prichard aren’t exceptions to that national picture. They show what it looks like when these issues catch up with a community.

When the bill comes due…

Puerto Rico’s 2019 infrastructure assessment gave the island’s systems a D-, and estimated the island needed $1.3 to $2.3 billion in new investment every year, just to bring infrastructure up to a standard that could support economic growth. That estimate predates this summer’s water rationing by years, and it didn’t even fully account for deferred maintenance or the ongoing costs of hurricane recovery.

In Corpus Christi, the state had already committed more than $750 million in low-interest loans toward the city’s long-planned desalination facility, but the project stalled for years under shifting plans and indecision. Meanwhile, the separate desalination project being pursued by the Nueces River Authority, the agency Governor Greg Abbott appoints in full, carries an estimated price tag of $6.4 billion, a scale political science professor at Southern Methodist University Cal Jillson called fundamentally mismatched with an agency that has an annual budget of roughly $5 million and is governed by unpaid, part-time board members who historically meet just once a quarter.

In both places, the “crisis” making headlines this year is really a decade or more of deferred bills finally landing all at once.

Prichard fits the same mold, just smaller in scale and longer in duration. The receiver managing the utility has estimated it will take $300 million to $400 million to repair and upgrade the system, a figure that dwarfs anything the city or its water board could plausibly raise on its own, especially with the state’s environmental agency deeming the utility ineligible for direct loans until it meets loan-readiness requirements the receivership was specifically created to address.

How the water is disappearing…

More than half of Puerto Rico’s clean water is lost to leaky pipes. That’s a huge infrastructure-monitoring problem. The losses happen in the parts of the system nobody is required to measure or report.

Prichard’s numbers meet the same point with almost eerie precision. The utility’s own receiver has identified more than 60 percent leakage in the water distribution system, essentially matching Puerto Rico’s loss rate.

Every gallon lost that way is a gallon the utility paid to treat but can never bill for, which starves the system of the very revenue it would need to fix the leaks in the first place.

It’s a terrible doom loop. Deteriorating pipes drive up costs, but the lost revenue makes it impossible to afford the rate increases that might otherwise pay for repairs.

Who is accountable?

In Texas, Abbott appoints all 21 members of the Nueces River Authority’s board and can remove any of them with a majority board vote. But he has no comparable authority over the Corpus Christi City Council.

Even as he publicly demanded the city “make a decision” on its water future, the river authority he fully controls was quietly running out of money for its own desalination project, and Abbott didn’t publicly pressure it the way he pressured the city. Sounds like selective use of power.

In Puerto Rico, the dodge shows up as an accountability gap created through political turnover rather than jurisdiction. Citizen coalition leader Alfredo Cuyar argues the crisis began when the governor replaced longtime water utility leadership with people unfamiliar with the island’s old and complex network of pipes and valves, and that the institutional knowledge that left with them hasn’t been recovered since.

Prichard shows a third variation. Its water board has been under court-appointed receivership since late 2023, after a judge concluded the utility couldn’t be trusted to run itself.

Yet even receivership hasn’t produced a clean fix. The receiver’s own recommendation, to transfer Prichard’s assets and liabilities to the larger, better-resourced Mobile Area Water and Sewer System, remains tangled in the politics of who would have to approve it and who would pay for it.

Meanwhile, a separate federal fraud case tied to the water board, in which a former operations manager pleaded guilty to defrauding the system out of $2.4 million, didn’t cause Prichard’s infrastructure crisis, but it makes plain how governance failures and physical failures can compound for years before anyone outside the community notices.

Puerto Rico Governor Jenniffer González-Colón told residents on television that the water cuts would continue until rain returned, describing the situation as a reality outside anyone’s control.

Texas’s governor took the inverse tack, publicly blaming local officials for squandering resources and indecision while his own appointed board was quietly running out of money behind the scenes.

Prichard’s version gets lost in red tape. State regulators didn’t blame drought, but they did point to loan-readiness technicalities, the very conditions receivership was supposed to fix, as the reason help couldn’t arrive this cycle.

All three are versions of the same move: reach for the weather, the paperwork, or someone else’s failure, before reaching for your own agency’s ledger.

Other water systems already flashing red 🚨

Corpus Christi, Prichard, and Puerto Rico aren’t really outliers. The American Society of Civil Engineers, which grades U.S. infrastructure on an A–F scale every few years, has repeatedly flagged systems around the country as being in “poor to fair” condition well before any crisis makes the news:

• Nationally, the country’s wastewater systems earned a D+ and stormwater systems a D in ASCE’s most recent report card, both unchanged from the prior assessment, signs of a system holding steady in mediocre condition rather than improving.

• Mississippi’s drinking water infrastructure was graded D in 2020 and has since gotten worse, not better, according to ASCE’s 2024 update. Jackson, Mississippi’s entire water system nearly collapsed in 2022, leaving the state capital’s roughly 150,000 residents without safe running water for weeks.

• West Virginia earned an overall D+ on its most recent infrastructure report card, with some water systems statewide losing more than 50 percent of treated water to leaks, the same kind of hidden loss driving Puerto Rico’s crisis.

• Alabama’s troubles aren’t limited to Prichard. The state’s utilities collectively face hundreds of millions of dollars in lead-line and system-upgrade needs, and Prichard’s receiver has flagged sanitary sewer overflows and consent-order violations on top of the leak rate, a small system carrying nearly every risk factor on this list at once.

The throughline holds nationally, too. I’m not talking about a handful of unlucky places. Anywhere with deferred investment, opaque data, and new industrial demands is at risk, and a growing number of U.S. communities meet that description.

When I talk about our water crisis, I’m talking about these issues. It’s also why the AI data center boom is so distressing. We already have incredible strains to our water infrastructure without the needs to draw billions more gallons of water from our water systems.

Google consumed 10.9 billion gallons of water in 2025, which is a 34 percent increase and more than double its 2021 level, while Amazon disclosed 2.5 billion gallons, according to Axis Intelligence Research.

The UN Secretary-General launched a global disclosure initiative in June, calling on major AI companies to measure and publicly report their water footprints. And in Texas, of the 341 data centers now operating in the state, 83 percent didn't comply with mandatory water reporting last year.

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A checklist for your community

Before your taps run dry, these are the questions worth asking now of your local water utility, your state agency, and your elected officials:

• Who actually controls your water authority’s board — is it elected or appointed by a single official who can also remove members at will?

• Has your utility ever published a leak or water-loss rate, and when was it last independently audited?

• Is there a known maintenance backlog, and will any official put a dollar figure on it on the record?

• Have local officials or agencies denied or delayed public records requests related to water infrastructure spending, contracts, or communications?

• Is a “crisis” being blamed on weather when the underlying vulnerability such as aging pipes, stalled projects, unfunded plans predates the weather event?

• Is responsibility split across multiple agencies or levels of government in a way that lets each one point at the other when something goes wrong?

• Is a data center, cryptomine, or other large industrial water user moving into your area, and if so, has anyone published its actual water source, usage figures, and cooling design or is that information being withheld as proprietary?

• Has your state’s ASCE infrastructure report card graded your water or wastewater systems D or lower, and if so, has that grade improved, stayed flat, or gotten worse at the most recent update?

• Has your utility ever been placed under receivership, a consent order, or a fraud investigation, and if so, has that oversight actually produced funding and repairs or just documented the problem without fixing it?

If the answer to more than one of these is troubling, it’s worth raising publicly, before the rationing schedule shows up.

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Is your water system struggling? Which community do you think is next? Let us know in the comments below.