Today, Austin, Texas—quirky; fun; site of music, tech, and movie innovation—got slapped with a hard dose of reality. The entire city is under a boil order. The water may not be safe to drink, and the city’s treatment plants are only operating at about one-quarter their usual capacity.

The cause is flooding along the Highland Lakes chain, a group of six lakes created by the damming of the Colorado River and ending right in downtown Austin. The flooding has been going on for a week, and all the debris and silt washed downstream has overwhelmed the capability of the water treatment plants.

Austin is the eleventh-largest city in America, bigger than Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore, and Washington DC. Imagine if one of those cities had no safe water to drink. The city officials here don’t have a clear idea of when the boil order will be lifted, either. As you might imagine, folks are on edge. Stores are selling out of bottled water; restaurants are shutting their doors; schools are trying to figure out how to keep kiddos safe.

When I was writing Dry Run, I read a lot about climate change. Since the story took place in Austin, I read even more about what the Austin area specifically could expect in the next hundred years. One of the more interesting things I found was that rainfall totals weren’t supposed to change much. I’d expected drought, no rain. That’s just not what the science says. What it does say, though, is that the same amount of rain will fall over a much more concentrated period of time. We’ll have more intense droughts and more severe floods.

One weather event can’t be chalked up to climate change, but floods like this one along the Highland Lakes are going to happen more frequently, perhaps even more severely. Climate change isn’t some sudden extinction event. It’s more subtle, easier to ignore. But this is just a teaser of what we can expect.

Announcement: Look for the release of my next book, Flanked, this winter. I’d planned to have it out this fall, but I’m a perfectionist, and I’m not quite ready to let Flanked go just yet. It’ll be worth the wait. Subscribers to my mailing list, be on the lookout for early-release content!

Fun Fact: The title of this blog post is taken from the excellent Bruce Springsteen song, Livin’ in the Future.