Dylan Baddour | Inside Climate News

IDE Technologies hopes to revolutionize—and privatize—the state's supply of water. As booming growth stretches the state's water resources to their limits, communities are turning to private, foreign suppliers.

What started as a novel plan to provide an unrestricted water supply to the oil and gas industry turned into a political quagmire that has consumed the city.

Reservoirs have rebounded from critical levels, but an emergency order absolves the city of requirements to resume releasing water for the Nueces River Delta.

Residents and small businesses across the Corpus Christi region subsidized big industrial plants' water bills for years, city officials say. The companies are now fighting to keep the subsidy.

For the retired shrimper, the 8,000-mile trip to Formosa Plastics' annual shareholder meeting in Taipei was part of a strategy of being relentless.

In April, one of the city's three reservoirs received its first inflows in eight months. But narrowly avoiding an immediate disaster doesn't mean that Corpus Christi has solved its water crisis.

Small towns around Corpus Christi worry where they'll fall on the pecking order if the region's water runs out.

City leaders intend to make unprecedented cuts to water use in September, but they aren't sure exactly how.

Even hospitals are drilling wells as the region's reservoirs reach disastrously low levels and ratings agencies downgrade the city's outlook.

Cities, towns and industrial complexes aim to quickly pump tens of millions of gallons per day in a bid to avert disaster.