By Seamus McGraw
July 26, 2018
Even in the best of times, water in Texas has always been an ornery and mercurial resource. It falls from the sky in torrents in the sodden eastern counties along the Gulf of Mexico and falls sometimes not at all in the parched counties to the west where, in a good year, a foot or less of rain might make it to the ground.
And those good years have always been punctuated by bad ones. It’s almost a maxim that the climatological history of Texas is in a constant cycle of drought and flood, with periods of just plain hardship in between.
But now, most scientists agree, climate change is making those cycles more severe, the droughts drier and the storms more vicious. And Texas’ antiquated laws are potentially priming the state for a water crisis.