The 6,000 people who get their drinking water from Greenbelt Lake have been boiling it since Sept. 8, the reservoir behind the tap is down to 4.7 percent of the water it was built to hold, and the company that has offered to fix the problem is a data center operator with wells of its own.
Childress County Judge Kimberly Jones signed a local state of disaster on Sept. 17 under Section 418.108 of the Texas Government Code, the law that lets a county judge declare an emergency without waiting for the state. The proclamation ties the emergency directly to the weather: “Due to extreme heat, high temperatures, and ongoing drought conditions the disinfectants have evaporated, resulting in a boil water notice.” It runs 30 days unless the commissioners court renews it. The City of Childress, which distributes the water, declared its own local disaster earlier in the week, according to KFDA and KAMR in Amarillo; the city council scheduled a called session for noon Sept. 17 at Fair Park Auditorium to consider extending it.
The boil-water notice, issued Sept. 8, says, “due to low disinfection residuals the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has required the City of Childress public water system #0380001 to notify all customers to boil their water prior to consumption,” it reads, and closes: “Due to ongoing extreme heat, disinfectants have evaporated, resulting in low disinfectant residual and this notice.” Chlorine breaks down faster in hot water, and a system running low and hot struggles to keep enough of it in the pipes to kill what gets in.
The lake explains the rest. Greenbelt Lake held 2,823 acre-feet of its 59,968 acre-foot conservation pool on Sept. 17, according to Water Data for Texas, the monitoring service run by the Texas Water Development Board, the agency that plans and finances the state’s water supply. The surface sat at 2,607.35 feet, about 57 feet below a full pool and roughly 17 feet above the elevation at which no more water can be drawn out at all. A month ago the lake was 5.2 percent full. A year ago it was 8.9 percent. Texas reservoirs collectively stood at 72.8 percent full the same day, down from 76.5 percent a year ago.
The Greenbelt Municipal and Industrial Water Authority, which owns the lake and sells the water, has put its customers on mandatory rationing, and Childress has moved to the most severe stage of the drought plan it adopted in 2019. Greenbelt is now drawing about 60 percent of what it delivers from groundwater and 40 percent from the lake, general manager Bobbie Kidd told the Clarendon Enterprise on Sept. 16, a shift from roughly 70 percent groundwater a month earlier.
The state’s own records show a system that was already struggling before the lake got this low. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s drinking water viewer lists 18 violations at the Childress system over three years, including four exceedances of the limit on trihalomethanes, a byproduct of disinfecting water that carries more organic material. Two of those, from the first and second quarters of this year, remain unresolved.
Into that gap has stepped Lancium, which operates a roughly 750-megawatt data center campus near Childress. The company met jointly with the Greenbelt board and the Childress City Council on Aug. 18 at Fair Park Auditorium and proposed building about 16.5 miles of pipeline and a treatment plant at its own expense, drawing on three of six wells it holds near Kirkland in the Blaine Aquifer, and leasing the finished line to Greenbelt for two years at no charge, according to the Clarendon Enterprise. The paper reported that the Greenbelt board voted to move forward and that nothing has been signed. The line would need a permit from the state environmental agency. Kidd told the paper he hoped water could enter the system in the first quarter of 2027.
The public money is further out. Childress appears on the Water Development Board’s draft plan for its 2027 drinking water loan fund, ranked 13th with 102 points, seeking $16,739,700 for a project the application describes as “procuring vital water infrastructure to ensure community resilience in the face of the catastrophic ongoing drought.” Construction is estimated to run from September 2027 through January 2029. The city scored zero of the available points on one criterion — whether it had adopted a water conservation or drought contingency plan within the past five years. Public comment on that draft closes at 5 p.m. Sept. 18.
The county’s declaration will hold for a month unless the commissioners court acts sooner. Childress residents are scheduled to hear what comes next at a public meeting at 6 p.m. Sept. 21.