Where's The Water?

California, Virginia, and Colorado. A lawsuit, a cover-up, and a collapse. Here's what these three areas tell us about the future of our water.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

Every place I’m about to describe has water, technically, somewhere. What it doesn’t have is a fair way to decide who gets it.

In these three stories, a pattern emerges. Water in this country doesn’t run out so much as it gets reassigned—quietly.

A tech company can restructure a farm lease into a river-water claim. A state agency can sit on bad news about an aquifer for half a year while local governments keep approving the projects that stress it. A town of 30 people can lose its water tower and its government in the same breath.

This story is about power, and the ongoing questions of who controls our water. Who gets to write the rules while everyone else is stuck reading the boil-water notice?

Let’s take a closer look at California, Virginia, and Colorado.

The Imperial Valley’s “last resort”

Let’s start in Southern California, in a place most of the country pictures as empty desert. In fact, the Imperial Valley is one of the most productive farming regions in the U.S., growing much of the country’s winter vegetables along with alfalfa, lettuce, and dates that show up on tables far outside California.

It sits right against the Colorado River, and for more than a century that river is the only reason any of this farmland exists at all. Take the water away and the “valley” goes back to being desert within a season.

That’s the backdrop for a company called Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing, which spent months publicly promising that its planned 330-megawatt AI data center would not touch the Colorado River. The plan, as pitched, was to run the facility on recycled wastewater from the nearby cities of Imperial and El Centro. Sounds like good optics, right?

As a reminder, the Colorado River is the only source of fresh water in the region. There’s no backup aquifer to lean on and no second river a few miles over. Not to mention that the river itself is in serious trouble at dangerously low levels this year, the kind of decline water managers across seven states have been sounding alarms about for years.

So when a company says its data center won’t draw from the river, in this particular valley, that’s not a nice-to-have commitment. It's the only commitment that actually protects the region’s water supply.

Then the recycled-water deal fell apart. In April, the company applied for industrial water service straight from the Imperial Irrigation District (IID). IID said no within nine days. So, the company sued for roughly 260 million gallons of Colorado River water a year, or about 750,000 gallons a day, to cool a 950,000-square-foot campus.

In press coverage, the company has framed the river water as a “last resort.” The legal strategy is what should worry every water-scarce community in the West.

The company leased 160 acres of active farmland right next to the site, land that historically pulled around 804 acre-feet of water a year, which happens to line up almost exactly with what the data center needs. The pitch is that idling the farm and redirecting its water allocation to the server racks amounts to zero net new demand on the river.

Water advocates and legal experts aren’t buying the “no net new demand” framing, and neither am I.

They are not talking about farming that land. They are talking about acquiring the water rights attached to it. If a court signs off on that logic, it becomes a blueprint. Any developer looking to build in the arid West can lease a farm, fallow the fields, and walk off with senior water rights that were meant to keep food growing.

The river doesn’t get a drop back. The farmland just disappears, one lease at a time.

Imperial County isn’t waiting to find out how this plays in court. Supervisors passed an emergency moratorium on data center development in June and extended it a year in July, buying time for a new advisory board to write actual zoning rules.

The company has already sued over the first moratorium, and says it’ll challenge the second one too. So far, the county has decided a year of caution is worth more than a rushed yes.

Virginia's aquifer report, six months late

In July, Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality released a 117-page study. A report state law required by the first day of this year, but that lawmakers didn't actually see until the third week of July, months after the General Assembly had already gone home and passed a budget.

That means that the people who make Virginia’s water policy made this year’s decisions without the data they were legally required to see.

The report, the most comprehensive study ever conducted of the state’s coastal aquifer, looked at the eastern coastal plain that supplies water to a huge swath of the data center corridor, and the news isn’t great. The groundwater supply there is constrained, and current projections point to declining availability in the near future.

The scientists recommend that regulators get more authority to reject industrial water withdrawal permits, require companies to look at alternative water sources, and crack down on users pulling more than they should.

To be fair to the report's authors, they didn’t pin the blame squarely on data centers, as they noted that there simply isn’t enough publicly available information on data center water use to draw that conclusion cleanly.

But that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it?

We can’t hold an industry accountable for what it won’t disclose. Six months of delay on a report that says “we don't have enough information to know how bad this is” tells you almost everything you need to know about how seriously the state has been treating transparency here.

The report specifically modeled what would happen if a data center tried to pull water from the ground. Henrico County, which just made headlines for its skyrocketing electricity bills, came back with one of the worst numbers in the state, less than 30,000 gallons a day of headroom.

To put that in perspective, a single hyperscale data center with evaporative cooling can use hundreds of thousands, even millions, of gallons a day. That math doesn’t work. By the state’s own scientific modeling, the water is tapped out.

That’s why two state senators, one Democrat, one Republican, sent Governor Abigail Spanberger a letter last week asking her to call a special session on the state’s groundwater supply. They believe the data is that alarming.

In addition, the senators pointed out that the Potomac River, the main source of drinking water for more than two million Virginians, was named the country’s most endangered river.

“Whether Virginians draw water from a private well or through a public water system, families across the Commonwealth depend on clean, reliable drinking water,” they wrote. “Article XI, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia declares it the Commonwealth’s policy to protect its waters from pollution, impairment, or destruction for the benefit and general welfare of the people.”

Data centers use enormous volumes of water to cool their servers, and as the industry has expanded, complaints about companies not disclosing how much water they’re using or where it’s coming from, have followed.

Virginia is just the biggest example of a pattern playing out nationwide.

The new report provides specific recommendations for both the legislative and executive branches including strengthening DEQ’s authority over groundwater withdrawal permits, requiring greater consideration of alternative water sources, improving monitoring and enforcement, and tying local development planning to groundwater availability.

The Colorado town that ran dry

The third story is smaller in scale but just as telling.

Hartman, Colorado, population 30, an old farming town in the southeast corner of the state, may not exist as a town much longer. Last week, the Colorado Secretary of State's office approved a resident’s petition for abandonment, which effectively hands over all of Hartman’s business and assets to Prowers County.

How does a town just stop being a town?

Every one of Hartman’s elected officials resigned earlier this year amid infighting, fraud allegations, and a physical altercation after a Board of Trustees meeting. With no government left, the town couldn’t hold elections or address what had become a genuine public health crisis. Hartman has been under a boil water order for a full year, and its water tower has needed serious repair for far longer than that.

State lawmakers actually wrote a bill this session, Senate Bill 157, specifically to deal with towns like Hartman, making it easier to declare a municipality abandoned so the state can step in and fix failing water systems.

In its order, the state was blunt about the stakes: without a finding of abandonment, residents would stay stuck in legal limbo during an active health hazard, with no one authorized to hold elections, conduct town business, or repair the infrastructure needed to get clean water flowing again.

Not everyone in Hartman agreed with how this played out. Some residents pushed back on the process, arguing the town wasn’t the one that failed here but rather the systems meant to protect it did.

The state overruled those objections. Prowers County now takes over the streets, the town-owned property, and the water infrastructure, which it will eventually hand off to a water operator.

It's a strange, sad case, but it’s not really isolated. It’s what happens when small-town governance and aging water infrastructure both erode at once, and no one steps in until the situation is a full-blown crisis.

Hartman didn't have a data center draining its water. It just had decades of neglect and a broken water tower nobody fixed in time.

The U.S. has about 50,000 community water systems, or public water systems that supply water to the same population year-­ round. More than 90 percent of these systems are quite small, serving 10,000 or fewer people. EPA data shows that smaller systems report health-based violations at higher rates than large utilities.

It’s not that these places have worse surface or groundwater. In most cases, they have less capacity to maintain their systems. They may have one part-time certified operator, no engineering staff, and a rate base too small to fund repairs to century-old infrastructure.

The Crisis

Hartman’s collapse has precedent. Flint, Michigan, switched water sources in 2014 to save money, without treating the water to prevent corrosion. Lead leached into the drinking water supply for nearly 100,000 people, and it took 18 months of residents raising alarms before the state admitted the problem.

Jackson, Mississippi, told a similar story on a bigger scale. Mayors and city council members had called for repairs since the 1940s, but it took a 2022 flood knocking out the main treatment plant, leaving roughly 150,000 residents without safe water, before anyone acted, and the system only reached full regulatory compliance in 2025.

What connects these places isn’t size but sequence. The failure was visible for years before it became a crisis, and the people with the least power to fix it were the last to find out how bad it had gotten. Now put a data center next to that pattern. The entity making the call in Imperial County isn’t a cash-strapped city government. We now have companies with big budgets suing water districts when they are told no.

Is that democracy, or just decision-making by whoever can afford to outlast the fight?

In all these cases, someone with power moved first, and the people who actually depend on that water found out last, after the terms were already set.

That’s the water crisis in this country. The people with the least power over the tap are always the last to know it’s been turned.

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If you’re near Imperial County, Virginia’s Data Center Alley, or southeast Colorado and you’re watching these issues up close, let us know more details in the comments below.