Thirsty New Subdivisions Have Made the Texas Groundwater Crisis Plain to See

As Texas’s population booms and the state grows hotter and drier, it’s more important than ever to understand: Who’s wasting our water? Longhorns used to graze across the street from the house where Ozzy Tirmizi settled with his family in Katy, a western exurb of Houston. He grew up in southern Pakistan, but his dad’s job in oil and gas brought them to Texas in 2011, when Tirmizi was eighteen. Over the following decade, he watched as pastureland was paved over. Strip malls replaced the grass, and the bovine neighbors disappeared.In 2019, Tirmizi entered a doctoral program in geology at the University of Houston. He learned to measure changes in ground elevation by using data from orbiting satellites and started working with a professor who…

The post Thirsty New Subdivisions Have Made the Texas Groundwater Crisis Plain to See appeared first on Texas Monthly.