AUSTIN, Texas — Texas leaders' dreams of unlimited development and a rush of AI data centers are on a collision course with a new reality of extreme weather, as this month’s flash floods hammer a landscape plagued by long-term drought.

Heading into the summer, the region faced perhaps its worst drought on record, until the dregs of Tropical Storm Barry poured torrential rain over Central Texas.

With Texans now facing both the aftermath of floods and a referendum that could release billions into new state water supplies and flood control projects, experts told The Hill, the state faces a critical question: Can it make the necessary investments in time to keep the economic miracle growing — and can it do so without either getting washed away or sucking the environment dry?

When it rains, it pours

The July 4 deluge funneled through limestone canyons, swelling rivers that tore through the Hill Country west of Austin and San Antonio and killing at least 132, with more than 100 others still missing — a death toll that makes the floods among Texas’s deadliest weather disasters of the last century.

Nor was that the end. Last Sunday, parts of the Hill Country that flooded Independence Day weekend were hit again by rainfalls that topped 10 inches, leading local leaders to call for mandatory evacuations.

But all this, experts say, was not enough to definitively break the grip of drought. Instead, they point to a new reality of chronic scarcity of water — punctuated, but not broken, by its sudden, terrifying abundance.

“It’s not a matter of ‘if’ there is another drought, but ‘when,’” said Robert Mace, director of the Meadows Center at Texas State University, a regional mecca for the study of water. “And the question is: Is that ‘when’ tomorrow? As soon as the rains stop, does the next drought start?”

For Austin, at least, the prognosis for its water supply has become less “scary,” Mace noted. The equivalent of more than 17,000 Olympic-sized pools worth of water thundering into the reservoir on Lake Travis took it from 41 percent full in April to 74 percent full by mid-July — inflows which have been matched or exceeded on the city’s other reservoirs.

But the rains, Mace noted, may have been less an end to the drought than a freak parentheses within it: a perfect storm of “three firehoses of moisture colliding over the Hill County” amid a broader reality in which Texas is getting drier.

Even after the floods, reservoirs on the San Antonio and Nueces rivers, critical for cities including San Antonio and Corpus Christi, remain near historic lows.

Water fights

On the eve of the floods, local attempts to stop the drawdown of Hill Country aquifers were stymied at the highest levels of the state.

In late June, Gov. Greg Abbott (R)

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