The Edwards Aquifer, which supplies drinking water to roughly two million people in San Antonio and the Hill Country, has spent several of the last ten summers under Stage 1 or Stage 2 pumping restrictions. The aquifer's index well at Uvalde has dropped below the Stage 2 threshold — 140 feet — repeatedly in the past decade. That is not a future risk. That is the operating condition Texas households already live inside.
A report this week from BriefGlance covers a proposed $5 billion desalination facility that would pull brackish or saline water from the Gulf of Mexico and process it into municipal supply. The project signals something real: Texas water planners are no longer treating desalination as a fringe option. The Texas Water Development Board has included large-scale desal in its long-range state water plan for years, and a project at this funding level would represent one of the largest public water investments in state history.
Here is the gap the news coverage skips over: major desalination infrastructure takes a decade or more from planning to tap. Permitting, environmental review, transmission pipeline construction, and integration with existing municipal systems do not move fast. Whatever gets announced this year will not be running water through your pipes before the mid-2030s at the earliest. The summers between now and then are yours to manage.
What's actually changing
Texas is not running out of water uniformly. The situation varies sharply by region and by source type. Houston's surface-water system faces different pressures than El Paso's heavily desalination-dependent supply or Midland-Odessa's strained Permian Basin groundwater. What is broadly true across the state: per-capita water demand is climbing alongside population, recharge rates for key aquifers have not recovered proportionally from the 2011 and 2022 droughts, and extreme heat is extending the high-demand season.
Municipal Stage restrictions — which dictate when you can irrigate, wash cars, or fill pools — can activate quickly when reservoir or aquifer levels drop. San Antonio Water System, the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, and other regional utilities publish trigger levels publicly. Most Texas households could not name their current trigger level. That gap between infrastructure news and household awareness is exactly where preparedness lives.
What we'd actually do
Find your utility's drought stage triggers and write them down. Go to your water provider's website and locate the current drought contingency plan — most Texas utilities are required by TCEQ to publish one. Write down what Stage 1, 2, and 3 restrictions actually prohibit in your specific district. This takes twenty minutes and eliminates the moment of confusion when a restriction activates and you're not sure whether your drip irrigation is compliant. Fines for violations start around $500 in most municipalities.
Store a meaningful amount of water for a short disruption, not the apocalypse. FEMA's standard guidance is 1 gallon per person per day for three days. For a Texas summer — where dehydration risk is elevated and power outages can interrupt well pumps — we'd push that to 14 gallons per adult stored in food-grade containers. A 7-gallon Reliance Aqua-Tainer runs under $25 at most hardware stores. This is not about surviving collapse; it's about not panicking during a 48-hour boil notice or a utility interruption after a storm.
Audit your outdoor water use before a restriction forces you to. Outdoor irrigation accounts for roughly half of residential water consumption in Texas during summer. If you have a programmable irrigation controller, set it to a schedule that would remain compliant under Stage 2 restrictions for your utility — typically two days per week before 10 a.m. or after 8 p.m. Doing this now means you are not scrambling to reprogram during a heat event when the restriction activates.
If you're on a private well, test it and know your pump's power requirements. An estimated 1.5 million Texas households use private groundwater wells. These fall outside municipal restriction systems, but they are not immune to aquifer drawdown. A basic water quality test ($30–$50 through a state-certified lab) establishes a baseline. Separately, knowing whether your well pump can run on a generator — and what size generator it requires — is information worth having before August.
The bigger picture
A $5 billion desalination plant is a serious infrastructure commitment, and it reflects a realistic read on where Texas's water future is heading. It does not, however, solve the household problem of this summer, or next. State-level investments in water supply are long bets on the 2040s. Household-level resilience is a short bet on the next ninety days.
The goal here is not to stockpile against catastrophe. It is to be the household on your block that handles a restriction or a disruption without a crisis — because you already knew your trigger levels, already had water stored, and already fixed the irrigation timer last spring.
Durability is built in the quiet moments before the restriction notice arrives.
