Laredo Confronts Drought and Water Shortage with Minimal Options

there would be lots of development that didn’t happen,” said Riazul Mia, assistant city manager of Laredo and former utilities director.

Now, fire hydrants in empty fields must constantly be backed by 1,000 feet per second of water in the pipes. Meanwhile, users on the far end are low income and don’t use much water, forcing authorities to dump the contents of parts of the system every few days when the stagnant water gets too old.

There’s another problem: 30% of Laredo’s pipes are more than 40 years old.

“We have grown so fast we didn’t have the funding to replace the old pipes,” Mia said. “So now you have all these new subdivisions, which are eventually connected to old pipes.”

In February, a major transmission line from 1971 broke, leaving half the city without water and triggering a citywide boil notice.

The aging system means that the available budget goes to fix old pipes, leaving nothing leftover for the big projects this city needs to meet the challenges of population growth and drought.

“We Have to Stop Ignoring the Warning Signs”
Last year, Laredo’s 50-year water plan assessed that the city’s growth would exceed its water supply by 2040. It proposed a slate of expensive projects: pipelines running up to 150 miles to aquifers in nearby counties. (Laredo has no groundwater of its own.)

“We had this 2040 timeline in our heads, then with this year’s drought things just got out of control so quickly,” said Tannya Benavides, advocacy director with Commission Shift, an oil and gas watchdog in Laredo. “We have to stop ignoring the warning signs.”

Advocates agree: Thrice-weekly lawn watering will not be what carries Laredo into the future.

But as the City Council met last week, the biggest rains of the year so far were falling in Laredo and along the Rio Grande, dulling the sense of urgency toward the crisis that had seemed to be spiraling just a few days before. Mayor Pete Saenz warned the council not to lose focus.

“There’s a tendency once we start getting some rains to move away from whatever plans we have,” he said. “We can’t give up.”

The city needs more water supply soon. But all of its water budget is slated for system repairs, which will improve existing infrastructure — but won’t increase the amount of water supply. The federal infrastructure bill this year made money available for these sorts of city improvements. Saenz said that bill may be the best chance the city gets to upgrade aging infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Laredo’s representatives are working in Austin to seek state support for an emergency pipeline that would provide additional water supply. If the city were to foot the cost of such a pipeline itself, there’d be no virtually no money left for other city services.

“We need help. We cannot do it alone locally. It would throw us into a horrendous financial bind as a community for us to try to attempt to bring in water,” Saenz told the council. “If somehow the state says no, we have no choice. We’d have to suspend basically everything that we have.”

Dylan Baddour is covering Texas for @InsideClimateNews.This story is published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here.It is published here courtesy of the Texas Tribune, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government, and statewide issues.