Around 4 a.m. on May 15, in the 1-year-old South Texas town of Starbase, Jose Luis Bautista, a 25-year-old man from nearby Donna, rode a scissor lift around 50 feet up toward the ceiling of the “Starfactory,” where Elon Musk’s SpaceX makes parts for its Starship rockets. Bautista and other workers with Delta Fabrication and Machine Inc., a contractor out of Daingerfield, needed to replace metal beams supporting the structure of the factory with new ones.

Bautista strapped himself to a white beam that weighed nearly 8,000 pounds and was about 5 stories off the ground. The beam, Bautista’s supervisor would later tell Cameron County sheriff’s officers, had “not been adjusted correctly.” The supervisor, named as Brent Lee Harvey in the sheriff’s office case report, said that he had contacted a foreman, Omar Alvarado, and instructed his team to “properly adjust and secure the beam to the structure.”

According to the report, Bautista was attaching himself to another beam when the one he was already secured to started falling. Alvarado told a sheriff’s investigator that he was on the phone when the beam fell and took Bautista with it. Alvarado further told the investigator that Bautista may have thought the beam was secure because it had anchor bolts already installed on it. Bautista would hit the beam on the way down before falling to the concrete factory floor. 

Harvey said, per the report, that “he did not know why Jose Luis would have attached himself to the improperly secured beam.” Harvey also said that the bolts on the beam were temporary.

Within minutes of Bautista falling, a man described with the acronym “EHS”—likely an environmental health and safety specialist—started doing CPR, and security guards arrived to help load Bautista into one of Starbase’s ambulances, the report states. Doctors would pronounce him dead at a Brownsville hospital the same day. Three days later, after an autopsy, Cameron County would declare his cause of death “multiple blunt force trauma due to a fall.” 

The Cameron County Sheriff’s Office declared Bautista’s death an accident. Initial news reports said Bautista had fallen only 8 feet—rather than the much greater height described in the later sheriff’s office report—based on what hospital staff had told Cameron County Justice of the Peace Mary Sorola. Sorola did not respond to the Observer’s requests for more information about those conversations.

Starbase in 2021 (Ivan Armando Flores/Texas Observer)

It’s unclear whether SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was at Starbase—a name now used both for the newfound company town and the company’s production and launch facilities near Boca Chica Beach—on the day Bautista died. His private jet’s flight log shows his plane flying from Los Angeles to Brownsville on May 21, six days after the incident, and returning to California on May 22, the same day as the last Starship launch. The Starship exploded on May 22, prompting another mishap investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration. Musk hasn’t publicly commented on Bautista’s death. Cameron County Sheriff Manuel Treviño told the Observer in an email that the law enforcement agency gave all the evidence it collected to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

“OSHA is looking at specific violations of standards, so this could be violation of various fall protection standards, or mechanical equipment standards, mechanical lift standards,” Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant secretary of OSHA during the Obama administration, told the Observer. “OSHA’s probably going to be looking into other things, like training and some structural issues on how the beam was attached.” 

Bautista’s death is the first worker fatality at SpaceX’s South Texas facilities, but there have been numerous injuries there in the last few years. Just among its own employees—not including those working for contractors on-site—SpaceX saw 427 injuries and 9 respiratory illnesses between January 6, 2022, and June 10, 2025, according to documents SpaceX filed with OSHA and acquired by the Observer through a records request. These injuries included concussions, second-degree burns, partial finger amputations, hernias, dislocations, crushed hands, and broken ribs, legs, and ankles. 

OSHA did not release more recent records documenting injuries because they are part of ongoing investigations into incidents at the Starbase facility, one of which is Bautista’s death. 

Another ongoing investigation stems from a crane tipping over at SpaceX’s Massey testing site, which is a little more than five miles west of the factory and the launch pad. Workers were removing debris from a Starship exploding at the test site last year. As the crane fell, its operator jumped out of the cab and onto the ground, according to OSHA records, breaking his pelvis and wrist and receiving a minor head injury. OSHA cited SpaceX eight times for the incident, including a violation for a worker operating a separate crane with an expired license and another for the tipped-over crane not having been inspected in the last year. SpaceX is contesting all of the citations. 

An Observer analysis of injuries at SpaceX’s Starbase in 2025, using OSHA’s publicly available injury data, shows that the company had an injury rate that’s more than five times the national average for comparable space vehicle manufacturing facilities in the United States. The company’s facility in Hawthorne, California, which has more than twice the employees of Starbase, has less than half the injury rate of the South Texas site. OSHA confirmed these calculations as accurate when asked by the Observer.  

Some employees who suffered such injuries have filed lawsuits against SpaceX in Cameron County courts, many of which are still pending and have yet to see trial. This includes a former worker who had his leg crushed from being run over by a boom lift, another who got head injuries from a falling ladder, and another who fell into an improperly lit open pit. 

One open lawsuit, from San Benito resident Doroteo Perez, describes an incident that is similar to the circumstances of Bautista’s fall. Perez, who was an employee for a contractor working at Starbase in 2024, alleges that SpaceX personnel told him a piece of machinery he was dismantling was “structurally sound” before he began to dismantle it. “As soon as the Plaintiff began cutting, the structural piece collapsed upon Plaintiff’s person,” the lawsuit states. Perez’s attorney, Richard Zayas, did not respond to requests for comment about the case.

In the sheriff’s office case report from May, both Bautista’s foreman and superintendent point to Bautista being responsible for his own safety. Barab said it’s common for employers to shift blame for an incident to an employee, but that it usually doesn’t work as a defense.

“The employer has to prove that the employee was well trained, well supervised, well equipped, and violated the employer’s safety rules anyway,” Barab said. “Generally the employer also has to prove that employees who committed similar offenses have been disciplined in the past as well.”

According to the report, Bautista had only previously been warned to properly adjust his safety glasses, with Harvey and Alvarado both saying that Bautista didn’t have prior safety violations. 

“As management, you’re responsible to make sure that your crew and the people that are about to be on this task are fully aware of what’s going on,” a former foreman who worked on similar jobs at Starbase last year—and who requested anonymity out of fear of job-related consequences because they still work in the same industry—told the Observer. “In a situation like that, they should have been right there.”

The same ex-foreman noted that OSHA would likely be investigating whether there was a Job Safety Analysis (JSA) for the work Bautista was doing. Treviño, the Cameron County sheriff, when asked whether his investigators looked at a JSA, told the Observer: “not to my knowledge.” 

The City of Starbase and SpaceX did not respond to questions about Bautista’s death from the Observer. Neither did Delta Fabrication and Machine, Inc. 

Elon Musk, beside the right-wing president of Argentina in February 2025, wears a MAGA hat and wields a chainsaw, symbolizing his short-lived but destructive tenure leading DOGE. (Shutterstock)

In 2024, SpaceX was named one of the nonprofit National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s “Dirty Dozen,” after reporting from Reuters showed the Starbase site had hundreds of injuries, many of them not reported to OSHA.

“SpaceX is one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world. It has access to extraordinary resources, cutting-edge technology, and some of the most advanced engineers on the planet,” Jessica E. Martinez, the executive director of the nonprofit, told the Observer in a statement. “There is simply no excuse for workers being exposed to preventable hazards. Whether someone is a direct employee or a contract worker, their life should never be treated as expendable.”

OSHA is expected to take up to six months to conclude its investigation into Bautista’s death.  The agency rejected a records request for documents because its investigation is ongoing.

Meanwhile, less than a month after Bautista’s death, SpaceX went public, raising $75 billion in its record-breaking initial offering. The company’s stock valuation briefly made Musk the first trillionaire in world history.

The post Worker’s Death at SpaceX Factory Followed Hundreds of Injuries in Recent Years appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

This story was produced in partnership with the Texas Newsroom, the state’s network of public radio stations.

A decade ago, Corpus Christi’s regional water plan projected shortages as soon as 2050. The next plan, released five years later, shortened that timeline to 2030.

The next plan, released this year, said shortages were imminent, putting city leaders in a desperate scramble to avoid an emergency.  

Something’s not right with the calculations that underpin these plans, said John Michael, an engineering executive who has worked on local water infrastructure for 44 years.

“Whether it’s climate change or something else, our reservoir system is not as dependable as we once thought,” he said at his office in May.

He pointed to the regional water plans on his office table—700 pages in four-inch binders—which are prepared every five years by local committees using methodology provided by the State of Texas. These plans never factored in climate science or considered the projections that a warming planet could contribute to a drought as extreme as the one Corpus Christi now faces. 

In fact, as climate models predicted, every drought for the last 30 years in Corpus Christi, has exceeded the parameters contemplated in local plans, thanks to fatal delusions, deep in the heart of Texas’ methodology: Texas doesn’t plan for droughts to get worse. 

“The droughts keep getting worse,” said Michael, vice president of Hanson Professional Services in Corpus Christi.

Four droughts have punctuated his career, each hotter and drier than the last. Each one left the city scrambling to build out its water plans ahead of schedule. For decades, intensifying droughts consistently outpaced planning efforts until, by the start of this drought, the region ran out of plans. 

The problem is that methods developed by the Texas Water Development Board, an agency headed by appointees of the governor, use the worst drought conditions on record as a worst-case scenario for the future. 

“Drought‑of‑record planning is a foundational element of Texas water planning,” said a TWDB spokesperson, Kaci Woodrome. “It provides a consistent, statewide minimum baseline for evaluating water supply reliability.”

 The TWDB guides water planning processes for 16 regions in Texas, some of which plan for conditions worse than the drought of record, Woodrome said. It is well known that droughts worse than the drought-of-record can occur, she said. Climate scientists have concluded that the Earth’s warming atmosphere has made droughts worse over the past 25 years and will continue to do so over the next 25. 

But that isn’t reflected in Texas’ water plans. “Climate-related projections are not something that any of Texas’ state water plans have included,” Woodrome said, referring questions about climate to the Office of the State Climatologist. 

“The majority of factors point toward increased drought severity,” said an assessment of weather trends by the climatologist’s office in 2024, Corpus Christi’s hottest year on record. “Future rainfall deficits comparable to those earlier in the 20th century will have greater impacts due to higher temperatures.”

The region’s 2026 water plan, released in January, “explicitly recognized that, in the event of a repeat of the drought of record, the City of Corpus Christi, as a major water provider, was already facing an immediate shortage,” Woodrome said.

She added: “Such a shortage might increase if a new drought of record were to occur,” which is exactly what happened. 

By early this year, officials suspected that drought conditions in Corpus Christi had again surpassed the worst on record. The city’s models never indicated the reservoirs would get this low, said Corpus City Manager Peter Zanoni. But the models didn’t consider the possibility, or the science describing the likelihood, of a drought as severe as the region now faces. 

“We based it on the last drought-of-record,” Zanoni said. “This is the worst one yet.”

International scientific organizations projected decades ago that periods of drought would grow longer and more frequent as greenhouse gases continued to accumulate in the atmosphere.

If Texas had included projections of a warming climate in its water plans two decades ago, Corpus Christi might have been better prepared today, according to Robert Mace, a former deputy executive administrator of the Texas Water Development Board. 

It’s hard to draw specific links between the rise in global temperatures and the steady intensification of droughts in Corpus Christi, said Mace, now executive director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University, “but it’s very consistent with what we’d expect.”

In the 1990s, he said, “something changed” in the weather of South Texas. Droughts started to get hotter and longer. In addition to the impacts of climate change, tree ring data in Texas shows periods drier than any measured since records began less than 200 years ago, he said. 

“Communities really should be planning for droughts worse than the drought of record,” he said.

Instead, the assumptions of political leaders in Texas keeps regions like the Corpus Christi area planning for the previous drought and assuming that they have enough water to supply industrial water users requiring millions of gallons a day.

“The water plan has to be realistic,” said Larry Soward, a former executive director of the Texas Water Commission. “If you seriously looked at climate change, it would say: We can’t grow anymore unless we make some major changes.”

Political leaders in Texas have intentionally ignored this reality for decades, said Soward, who spent 35 years in state government. Acknowledging the risks of climate change would disrupt their economic agenda, Soward said, and interfere with the growth of business and industry. 

Soward witnessed Texas’ irrepressible growth as an attorney for the Water Quality Board in the 1970s, director of the Texas Water Commission in the 1980s and in the 1990s as special counsel on water for the Texas Department of Agriculture. During that time, the state built its last reservoirs but failed to devise a subsequent strategy, Soward said. So Texas kept growing, but its water supply didn’t. 

“There’s been a real lack of leadership,” he said. “Especially at the state level.”

As business prospered, temperatures warmed and water planners clung to unrealistic assumptions, each cycle of drought nudged Corpus Christi closer to the edge.

“The water plan has to be realistic,” said Larry Soward, a former executive director of the Texas Water Commission, pictured near his home in the Woodlands in May 2026. (Dylan Baddour / Inside Climate News)

By the start of this year, amid another unprecedented dry streak, Corpus Christi’s projections began to show total depletion of reservoirs within months if conditions persisted, prompting city leaders to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on emergency water projects.

Timely rains this spring reversed the reservoirs’ decline, and Corpus Christi’s water department told city council on Tuesday that its projected date for a “water emergency” has moved to late next year. But the good news came only after the region veered so near to the chasm that its residents and industries caught glimpses of the terrifying fall beyond.  

“This is what it takes to wake up,” Soward said. “Our past is catching up with us.” 

Corpus Chisti had just one reservoir, Lake Corpus Christi, when it came within months of running out of water during the drought of the 1980s. Then it added a second, larger reservoir, Choke Canyon. That era marked the end of large-scale reservoir building in Texas. All the easy spots had been developed, and land in Texas wasn’t cheap anymore. In order to keep up with growth, Corpus Christi would develop other options.

The 50-year water plan of 1993 laid out the strategy: a 100-mile pipeline to Lake Texana, where Corpus Christi acquired water rights, then a second pipe 40 miles farther to the Colorado River. 

The first pipe should be built by 2007, it said, and the second by 2029. These projects, the plan said, could meet regional water demand through 2050. When the plan was released, in 1993, Corpus Christi’s reservoirs were entirely full. Then came a drought of unexpected intensity, and by 1996 the region’s reservoirs hit 25 percent. 

“It was an all-out emergency,” said James Dodson, regional director of the Corpus Christi Water Department at the time. Dodson delivered a presentation to city leaders showing that supplies could run out completely, in a worst-case scenario, within two years.

So the city launched an extraordinary effort to design and build the first pipeline by 1998. 

“They pushed it, pushed it, and pushed it,” said Dodson. “It got done in record time.”

Reservoirs had fallen to 15 percent by the time water started flowing through the pipeline, named Mary Rhodes for the mayor who oversaw its construction.

The 1990s drought broke records in Corpus Christi and across Texas. “It kind of shocked everybody,” said Soward, who worked as special counsel on water in the 1990s for Texas Agriculture Commissioner Rick Perry. 

Perry became Texas governor and appointed Soward, in 2003, to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. 

During that time, Soward said, climate science had become a prominent part of the national conversation, as well as an increasingly politicized issue. “The water development board wouldn’t even mention it,” he said.

Many staff at various state agencies understood the implications of climate change and the need to plan for it, Soward said. Instructions not to plan for climate change, he said, came from elected officials and political appointees. 

“One water plan,” Soward said. “They actually re-wrote it because the staff had put too much in about climate change.” Once, he recalled, environmental groups proposed rules that would have incorporated climate projections into water planning. “Of course that went nowhere in the legislature,” he said. 

No one was worried about drought, Soward said. A few rainy years had refilled lakes across the state. The Choke Canyon reservoir, Corpus Christi’s largest, hit 100 percent (for the last time) in 2008. But Soward knew the problem wasn’t solved.   

“We ignore at our peril the looming supply and demand issues Texas faces,” he said in a 2010 speech on water funding to a conference in Houston. “A sea change in attitude and behavior will have to occur.”

When Soward’s patron Perry ran for president in 2011 and adopted denial of climate projections as a campaign plank, Soward told the website Texas Climate News: “It is utterly amazing to me how conveniently dismissive he is to a huge and growing body of worldwide science.”

Unrealistic policies, Soward wrote in the foreword of a 2012 book, Water Policy in Texas: Responding to the Rise of Scarcity, “have perpetuated a false sense of security and have inhibited any appropriate undertaking of comprehensive, long-term planning.”

“Climate-related variability in water supplies presents a strong potential for extreme stress on water resources,” he wrote. “Texas has one of the world’s most robust economies, but if sound, scientifically-based water management strategies are not implemented, it could face serious social, economic and environmental consequences.”

By 2014, a new drought again had broken all previous records in Corpus Christi. “During that period we apparently had experienced less rainfall than at any other time in previous history,” said Mark van Vleck, who worked as assistant city manager of Corpus Christi at the time. 

So the city rushed to build its second pipeline, initially projected for 2029, by 2016. 

Corpus Christi had built every water project in its plans. Having to build a pipeline 15 years earlier than originally projected didn’t raise any alarms. That year, in 2016, a new regional water plan projected surpluses through 2050. 

That’s why city leaders believed what they wrote, in March 2017, to ExxonMobil: “We feel that we have sufficient water supplies to meet your needs.”

The Texas oil major, in partnership with Saudi Arabia’s state chemical company, wanted to build an enormous plastics manufacturing plant that would consume more water than any other user in the region. 

It was part of an industrial boom that followed the shale revolution, when fracking in the oilfields of Texas began to produce a bounty of cheap oil and gas. For Corpus Christi it was a period of rapid economic expansion. But in 2019, when city leaders updated their water planning models to consider the record-breaking drought conditions of the previous decade, they lowered their estimates of the region’s water supply. 

Flint Hills Resources’ refinery in Corpus Christi pictured April 29, 2026, is one of the region’s largest water users. (Dylan Baddour / Inside Climate News)

Van Vleck displayed a graph at a city council meeting in 2019 showing the decrease. “What has caused the reduction of supply?” he said at the meeting. “The largest one is because of the new drought-of-record, which we’ve incorporated into the model.”

At the same meeting, city council members proposed to reconfigure rules to account for the lower supply. “They actually lowered the amount of water that we should have in reserve for a drought so that there would be more to sell,” he said.

Steel Dynamics built a steel mill nearby. Occidental Chemical, Valero and Flint Hills expanded existing facilities. The new Exxon plant started operations in 2022. 

Over a few years, the region added 36 million gallons per day of water demand, according to Don Roach, former assistant general manager for the San Patricio Municipal Water District, which serves industrial customers near Corpus Christi. The region’s total water consumption grew by 40 percent.

“That was the nail that sealed the coffin,” Roach said. 

The new Exxon plant started operations in 2022, with the region’s reservoirs only about 40 percent full. That’s about when the next drought began. 

At a Corpus Christi City Council meeting in July 2022, the chief operating officer of the city’s water department, Mike Murphy showed a graph depicting reservoir levels during the 2010s drought and presently. 

“The trajectory of the current drought that we’re in shows us quickly approaching the drought of record,” he said. “This is what’s really got us concerned.”

Furthermore, amid a year of record heat, lakes were dropping almost twice as fast as the city’s calculations had predicted. “We’ve noticed a shift in the model,” Murphy said. “The trajectory is a little more critical.”

The next year was even hotter, and the next year, 2024, was Corpus Christi’s hottest on record. 

Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Zanoni at a hearing over challenges to permits for the city’s emergency groundwater project. ( Dylan Baddour / Inside Climate News)

The city began drilling emergency water wells in January 2025. In March, reservoirs dropped to 30 percent, and the city upgraded drought restrictions to stage 2—“moderate.” Typical spring rain never came. Reservoirs hit 20 percent in December, and the city upgraded drought restrictions to stage 3—“urgent.”

“Day after day, week after week, month after month, we didn’t see the rain,” said Zanoni, the city manager. The dry spell persisted. A record-breaking heatwave formed in early spring. In March of this year, the reservoirs hit 10 percent, lower than they’d ever been. 

Projections showed that if the spring rains were absent again, like the year before, reservoirs could be dry by summer. Only one stage of drought restrictions remained: “emergency.” City leaders started hammering out, for the first time, what that scenario would look like.   

The Corpus Christi City Council authorized hundreds of millions of dollars to speed through an emergency groundwater project, leasing land and laying pipeline before the project received permits. But in May and June a state administrative judge sent Corpus Christi’s permits into a hearing process that could last years, effectively stalling the project.

Luckily, the spring rains came. Corpus Christi didn’t tumble over the edge this year. It now has about one year worth of water in storage and could end up with more if the drought ends soon, as some forecasts predict. 

But the region has a long way to go to find safe footing, said Michael, the vice president at Hanson. “We’re going to have to find new water,” said Michael, the vice president at Hanson. “We’re going to have to find a new way to pay for it.”

After four droughts in his career, he’s glad this was his last. He plans to retire. Droughts are scary, he said, and difficult to plan for. No one knows when they’ll begin or when they’ll end. And no one knows how severe a drought this region should prepare for. Someday we’re going to find out,” he said. “I just don’t want to be here when.”

Neena Satija of the Texas Newsroom contributed to this report. 

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At least 135 public schools have closed or have been approved to close all across Texas since late 2023, as districts face budget crises amid state funding shortfalls, according to data gathered by the public school advocacy organization Our Schools Our Democracy. 

Carrie Griffith, executive director of the Austin-based nonprofit, said every region of the state has been impacted by school closures. “It’s not specific to urban or rural areas. … It’s not confined to any sort of racial or ethnic breakdown.” Griffith said. “That is why we say it’s not a local failure; it’s a statewide trend.”

The number of Texas public schools facing closure more than doubled from 2024 to 2025, rising from 22 to 50, the nonprofit’s data shows. And in the first six months of 2026, Texas school districts have voted to close even more schools—at least 55—than last year.

Using school district board minutes and news reports, Our Schools Our Democracy found that closures spanned the state. The North Texas region had the highest number of schools—around 45—that have been or will be closed. Some closures are happening in districts that have been taken over by the state, including in Fort Worth, Houston, and Beaumont, according to a list the nonprofit continues to update. The Fort Worth Independent School District (ISD), which is now operating under the state’s  appointed board of managers, recently expanded its list of pending closures to include 19 campuses by June 2029. 

(Courtesy/Our Schools Our Democracy)

School funding is tied to student attendance, which has fallen in many public school districts around the state. Griffith believes that, apart from the issue of lower birth rates, charter schools and the new private school voucher program are also siphoning students away from public schools. 

The Houston area has 32 campuses and the San Antonio area has 23 campuses in the list compiled by the nonprofit.

Bobby Blount, the president of the Bexar County School Board Coalition and a Northside ISD board member for 27 years, said school districts’ growing budget deficits, in part linked to a lack of state funding, are a major factor leading to increased campus closures. 

Before a modest increase approved in the 2025 legislative session, lawmakers last increased investments to public schools in 2019. For a while, federal money tied to COVID-19 relief kept school districts afloat. But those funds dried up even as inflation and declining enrollment in public schools increased school deficits. Then, in 2023, Abbott obstructed an increase for school funding when lawmakers initially rejected school vouchers. More funding came only after vouchers were approved in 2025.

Griffith said she thinks the voucher program will accelerate the number of neighborhood school closures, which have already been affected by charter school expansions. 

“Just in this most recent biennium, the state paid $10 billion to charter schools, and that’s at a direct expense to the money going to public school districts … and now districts are also bracing themselves for the anticipated impact of losing students to private schools [through vouchers],” Griffith said. 

Even after lawmakers in 2025 passed what they called a “historic” $8.5 billion school funding package, it wasn’t enough to make up for prior years of shortfalls.

The Legislature raised the basic allotment, or the primary per-pupil funding, by $55, but it would have had to increase it by more than $1,300 just to keep up with inflation since 2019, according to Raise Your Hand Texas, a public policy group. Texas ranks in the bottom 10 states for average public education spending, according to data from the National Education Association. 

Instead of going to the basic allotment, which would have allowed school districts to use the increased funding as they needed, most of the new funding was earmarked for specific items. Kelly Rasti, the associate executive director of the Texas Association of School Boards, said the funding did not address the needs of many school districts because of the restrictions. 

“Increasing the basic allotment allows for school districts to direct the increased funding to what their local needs are,” Rasti said. She added the bill also created new spending requirements for districts. 

“How is it possible that this remarkable amount of money was invested into public schools and they’re still closing and they’re still adopting deficit budgets? It’s because the majority of that money was not directed in a way that schools can plug their existing holes.”

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