SATIRE: This is parody. Not a real news report.
HARLINGEN — Flanked by the most confident line graph in the Rio Grande Valley, city water officials announced Friday that Harlingen’s sewer system is ready, willing, and fully charted to supply 4.6 million gallons of treated wastewater a day to a 1,780-acre data center campus that currently exists mostly as a schedule.
“The chart goes up and to the right,” said Dee Cavazos, the utility’s newly created Director of Chart Assurance. “You can’t argue with a line. You can only stand next to it and nod.”
Under the contract, the developer pays roughly $1.2 million a year for the privilege of Harlingen’s finest reclaimed effluent at 75 cents per 1,000 gallons — a discount officials described as “friend pricing.” By the fourth quarter of 2030, the not-yet-open campus will need the full 4.6 million gallons daily, a number the utility’s treated flow meets on average, a word officials repeated slowly with rising eyebrows.
The Schedule Is Already Winning
Most impressive, officials said, is that the build-out schedule assumes the data center is already operating, with 500,000 gallons a day booked for this very quarter at a campus outside city limits that has not opened, broken ground, or returned a phone call.
“We’re currently delivering half a million gallons a day to a building that doesn’t exist, and frankly, that customer never complains,” Cavazos said. “The phantom campus is our most reliable account. Zero service calls.”
When a resident observed that treated flow fell below 4.6 million gallons on 152 days in 2023, officials explained that 2023 has been asked to leave the meeting, and that since then the population has grown, producing what one aide called “exciting new volumes.”
Drinking Water Waits in the Wings
Should the reclaimed supply run short or fail a quality test, the contract requires the city to substitute potable drinking water — a role the drinking water has been quietly rehearsing in a folding chair backstage since September.
“Our drinking water is a team player,” said Luis Alvarado, interim understudy coordinator. “It doesn’t ask why. It hydrates the cloud.”
Residents, who pay $1.83 per 1,000 gallons for that same drinking water, expressed something adjacent to gratitude that their kitchen taps are now on call for a 50-year commitment — 20 years plus two automatic 15-year extensions — to a server farm they cannot see from Loop 499.
“Every time the chart blinks, my shower is technically cloud infrastructure,” said one resident, who asked to be identified only as a person who pays a water bill. “It’s an honor. The cloud is very thirsty.”
Officials closed the briefing by unveiling the next chart, which shows Harlingen supplying 12 million gallons a day to a quantum computer that will be announced in 2034 and also does not exist yet.
