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When Thiago Campos bought the Mr. Fancy Pants Carwash business in Corpus Christi, Texas, three years ago, he wasn’t thinking about drought. He was familiar with varnishes and waxes and enjoyed figuring out which kind of soap would best remove local dirt.

“I’m a chemical engineer,” Campos said. “I felt like the carwash matched my skill set.” But Mr. Fancy Pants, with its two locations, could soon face an existential crisis. Last week, Corpus Christi’s city manager announced that it may enter a water emergency as soon as May. The city’s two main reservoirs — Choke Canyon and Lake Corpus Christi — are just 8.4 percent full, while the backup reservoir, 100 miles away, is 55 percent full. Without drastic cuts, the water supply for the more than 500,000 residents of the Corpus Christi area could run dry by early next year.

“To be honest,” Campos said, “I bought [the carwash] without really understanding what I was buying into.”

Although it might seem like the city has been abruptly pushed to the brink of disaster, experts say years of faulty planning have brought Corpus Christi to this point. Plans for the proposed Inner Harbor seawater desalination plant, which would have drawn from the Gulf of Mexico, fell apart in September as cost estimates crept up from an estimated $160 million in 2019 to $1.2 billion.

Inflation, tariffs, and supply shortages all drove the cost of construction up, but the scope of the project also expanded. Further complicating things: the plant faced pushback over environmental concerns — a study from Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi found that discharge from the plant would raise salinity in the bay and cause harm to marine ecosystems.

Climate-Fueled Heat Waves Are Creating a Water Crisis in the Southwest

Although Corpus Christi’s residents are under drought restrictions, which prohibit people from watering their lawns, the city has not asked........

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