Corpus Day Zero is a public water-supply dashboard for the Nueces Basin — the sole surface-water source for 500,000+ residents, five oil refineries, and the nation's top crude export port. I built it in about a week, from public data, to track how close the region's reservoirs were to "Day Zero," the point at which they hit dead pool.
In the middle of the drought, the City of Corpus Christi stopped updating its local monitoring pages — right as other outlets were sounding the alarm about a possible system failure. That left a real, newsworthy information gap: the people most affected couldn't easily see where their water actually stood. I decided to fill it.
From idea to live site took roughly a week. I pulled public data from USGS, the Texas Water Development Board, and NOAA, worked out the methodology myself, and designed and built the display — all with Claude Code. Speed was the point: the value of this information decays fast, so getting a clear, credible picture out quickly mattered more than polish.
The dashboard projects each reservoir's trajectory to dead pool under three scenarios — current trend, no rain, and a returning drought — modeled from local precipitation and USGS upstream streamflow (a beta model at R² = 0.918). To pressure-test my read of the situation before publishing, I spoke with a former member of the Nueces River Authority's board, who agreed with my assessment.
The project leaned on both halves of my background at once. Art direction shaped a legible, high-signal interface — the same discipline that makes me effective at directing AI to design and code. And writing did the heavy lifting on meaning: framing "why this still matters," turning reservoir percentages into stakes a resident actually feels, and stating plainly when the crisis had eased — without overstating that it was over. Both skills, applied fast and under real stakes.
Corpus Day Zero proved out an idea: public data becomes powerful when it's made legible and placed in context, fast. That idea grew into Perch, a living 3D civic dashboard for an entire city.