SATIRE: This is parody. Not a real news report.
HARLINGEN — In a heated emergency session Tuesday, the Harlingen City Commission formally requested that the massive data center proposed between Harlingen and Rio Hondo explain, in writing, where exactly all this additional rain is coming from and whether the servers intend to keep producing it.
“We did the math,” said Commissioner-at-large Ruben Talamantes, holding up a rain-slicked legal pad. “That facility hasn’t even broken ground, and my caliche driveway already has a catfish in it. We’re asking the cloud people a very simple question: is this your rain, and if so, can you take it back?”
The facility — a proposed server farm so large it will reportedly store the Valley’s entire backlog of unused Instagram likes — has asked Harlingen for permission to discharge stormwater into a city-owned drainage canal, offering millions in widening improvements in exchange. But commissioners say that raises an even bigger question: why a building full of computers, which everyone knows are dry, keeps manufacturing gallons of additional Gulf moisture that then heads directly toward Valley International Airport.
Commission Votes 5-0 to Schedule a Meeting About Scheduling the Town Hall
Under the city’s ongoing data center moratorium, which has now been under study longer than some commissioners have been alive, officials voted unanimously to approve a pre-town-hall agenda-review listening session, to be followed by a post-town-hall reflection mixer at a location to be determined by a subcommittee that has not yet been seated.
“We are moving with all deliberate speed,” said City Manager Dolores Cavazos-Krentz, speaking from a rowboat on Commerce Street. “First we determine whose rain it is. Then we determine whose ditch it is. Then, God willing before dove season, we determine whose fault the catfish is.”
Engineers for the project insist the data center will not generate rain, clouds, humidity, or dew, a claim commissioners called “exactly what a rain factory would say.” One resident presented the commission with a Mason jar of suspicious weather as evidence.
Company Offers to Widen Every Ditch in Town Twice
In exchange for drainage access, the developers have reportedly offered to widen the canal, deepen the canal, install a second canal as a backup, and pay for a commemorative plaque reading “This Ditch Brought to You by the Internet.”
“We are simply a building,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “Buildings do not make rain. We store data. Admittedly, a lot of people are asking the cloud for things lately, and clouds do have a well-known relationship to precipitation, but we cannot comment on ongoing weather.”
The commission tabled the statement pending a study, expected to conclude sometime after the second flood.
