Corpus Christi, Texas, calls itself the “sparkling city by the sea”. But lately it doesn’t feel very sparkling. The city imposed a four-day ban on consuming any tap water last Wednesday. No one could drink the water, shower, bathe, do dishes, wash laundry, hands, faces or children with it. There were fears that a corrosive asphalt emulsifier Indulin AA86 had snuck all the way from the city’s industrial district into our homes due to a “back-flow incident”. There was water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.
On 1 December, the Corpus Christi city hall received the first report of dirty water from Refinery Row. On 7 December the city hall received their second, on 12 December their third. By then the water was shimmery, sudsy – just the kind of sheen we would soon fear creeping into our commodes.
On 14 December, city hall told us not to consume tap water. If it was contaminated with Indulin AA86, then drinking it could sear our stomachs, light up our lungs and burn any bodily organ it contacted through water or air.
Where were the men and women who would put public safety before all else? Where were the leaders who would make sure that the companies in charge installed and maintained a backflow preventer that would have kept Indulin AA86 where it belonged: out of our tap water.
But this is only Corpus Christi, a forgotten scab of a city. A tiny, immaterial industrial outpost marking naught but the dwindling Texas shoreline as it slopes and surrenders on its muddy fall to Mexico. This is the small potatoes of municipal incompetence; until it isn’t. Until we look to the future of the Trump administration and see the shimmering signs of far worse to come.
Streets need their protectors, cities need them too. And countries? Most notably, a country that’s among the biggest environmental offenders, a country whose ties to big business, big oil, big money are notorious for putting profit before the public good? That kind of country doesn’t need Scott Pruitt, it doesn’t need Rex Tillerson and it certainly doesn’t need Rick Perry.
Had Corpus Christi taken as much care with its public facilities as it does with the maintenance of private residencies, my two-year-old daughter might not have known what it was to be thirsty on the morning of 15 December, 2016. But with a Trump administration around the corner, I have to check myself: four days without water is nothing compared to the damage that four years without oversight, without vigilance, without care could do to our water and to our land.
Four days of thirst. Will it foreshadow the harm that Trump’s fossil fuel friends in the cabinet will bring? We all know the line-up: Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier and advocate for fossil fuel, at the helm of the EPA; Rick Perry, a climate change denier and apostle of Texas oil and gas directing the department he famously forgot he wanted to eliminate; and Rex Tillerson, a man whose successful devotion to commercial profit as the CEO of ExxonMobil is the absolute epitome of placing private over public good.
This is the very formula for successful municipal management that helped land me and my family thirsty and hunting for water last week. This is the very mindset that may have introduced Indulin AA86 into our water supply. This the very philosophy that sent me scouring supermarket shelves for four hours in three towns while my daughter cried in her carseat.
Our water is back now; the ban has been lifted. But every time I turn on the tap I hesitate, I hope for the best. That feeling will only grow stronger the closer we get to a Trump administration.
A toxic leak left Corpus Christi with no water for days. A taste of things to come? | Sarah McClung
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