Texas Monthly is a real icon of state-based journalism, but the magazine out did itself this month with its astoundingly deeply researched story on the state of the Rio Grande and water issues on both sides of the border. Just one excerpt here, in a piece as long as your standard New Yorker story in 1955:
Farther downriver in the Rio Grande Valley, cities have been slower to adapt to the crisis, and they’ve run out of time. This year, when the multigovernment Rio Grande Regional Water Planning Group released its official 2026 strategy, local officials from across South Texas admitted that they had no plan in place for what happens if the drought continues to worsen. The report offered the weakest of excuses: “The Rio Grande RWPG chose not to plan for uncertainty or DWDOR [drought worse than the drought of record] on a regional scale at this time because forecasting tools have not been able to provide the resolution needed for water planning on a regional basis.”
The Valley is home to a handful of desalination plants, and officials are scrambling to bring others online. In addition to the high price tag, these facilities will come with immense environmental costs: Toxic saline sludge will get pumped out into surrounding wetlands.
Farmers themselves have actually pushed for more measures to improve efficiency. Galeazzi, the lobbyist, told me he’s spent time in Austin and D.C. arguing for public investment in water infrastructure. Some of the simplest changes, such as lining dirt irrigation canals with concrete, would save millions of gallons of water. But Galeazzi says politicians balk when they learn that those savings will cost billions of dollars.
In the end, there’s no clever technology that can pull us back from the brink. “No matter what we do—desalination, irrigation tech, conservation in cities, rainwater harvesting, aquifer recharge—there is no way out,” Sandoval Solís said. The only thing that can help now is reducing agricultural water use. Everything else is too little, too late.
With the reservoirs in critical condition, Sandoval Solís said it could take just two dry years to wipe out the water that remains. And he fears that on the Mexican side of the river, over a million people could experience Day Zero as soon as next year.
If the reservoirs collapse, South Texas will get thrown back to a more primitive era. Sanchez, the researcher from Saltillo, doesn’t think Day Zero in the Valley will look like it did in Monterrey. It will look worse. “Mexico is actually much more resilient to water scarcity than the U.S., only because they’re used to it,” she said. “I cannot imagine my neighbor in Texas opening the tap and not getting water. What would happen? They would probably sue the city.”
Elsewhere around the world, Day Zeroes have been rare, but they almost always lead to violence. In 2015, São Paulo, Brazil, a city of over 20 million, got within weeks of Day Zero. Caught off guard, the government chaotically announced a strict limit: Water was turned off for twelve hours a day in neighborhoods across the city, leading to mass protests. In 2019 several reservoirs in Chennai, India—one of the world’s largest cities—ran completely dry, and taps stopped flowing for months. The government trucked in water by train and in convoys of tankers, but it couldn’t meet demand for more than 10 million residents. Tankers entering the city were attacked and hijacked. A woman was stabbed while arguing with a neighbor over water. In one of the larger riots in the region that summer, police arrested at least 550 people.
If a similar crisis comes to pass in Texas, governments in Austin and Washington, D.C., won’t be able to offer much more than tanker trucks. For residents, the most important technology will become the bucket, which they will need to bathe, launder clothes, and flush the toilet. Even if the rains return, this sort of deprivation could last for years as residents wait for the reservoirs to refill.
Thousands of Texans already live this way. During one reporting trip, I drove into the brush outside of Laredo until I reached the community of La Presa, known locally as a colonia. One of the residents I met there was Luz Castillo, a retired farmwork manager. She explained that in the nineties, a rancher had sold her an illegally subdivided plot of land, falsely claiming that he had plans to connect electricity and water lines. She was nine months into building her house when she realized he had lied to her. Today, Castillo trucks in her own water using a five-hundred-gallon jug in the back of her pickup. She’s spent thirty years organizing her neighbors and petitioning the county to connect water mains. “They are so hesitant to help you,” she said.
La Presa contains a warning for those on the brink of losing their water: The state is doing little to help its own residents secure this most basic resource.
The collapse of the borderlands’ water system would transform life in the region. Millions of Texans will face the immediate pressure to relocate, fueling the kind of disaster migration Texas saw when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. On both sides of the border, the agricultural system could break down completely.
There will be other more subtle but equally devastating long-term effects. South Texas is already home to some of the poorest counties in the nation, and the water scarcity will discourage investment and new business. Instead of preparing for that future, boosters are conducting business as usual. In fact, the Valley is booming.
One of those boosters is Elon Musk, whose gigantic south Texas investments all require water from the Rio Grande that is probably not going to be there very much longer. My other favorite piece of this is Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum shutting off water to Monterey in order to appease Donald Trump. Not that Mexico really is more responsible with the declining water than the. U.S., but it’s also not less responsible. Also, for all the talk that the ranchers will lose out eventually to the population in terms of water usage, the problem is that the legal mechanism for taking allocated water from agriculture is very very shaky.
This is a slowly ticking time bomb and that excerpt has it right: expect violence over water in the U.S. very soon.