from the August 27, 2008
Issue Twenty Six, Volume One
Water Future
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| LEE JAMES / The Free Press |
| This is a shot of the site where water will be drawn for the Buckman Direct Diversion project. The project will serve Santa Fe, Santa Fe County and Las Campanas. |
$180.9 million BDD is close to construction
By Lee James / The Free Press
A huge venture to enhance the area’s water supply is nearing the construction stage.
The Buckman Direct Diversion Project is a $180.9 million effort to pipe water from the Rio Grande into the systems of the city of Santa Fe, Santa Fe County and the community of Las Campanas.
The city and county are sharing the cost of the project. Las Campanas is paying a proportional share and plans to build at its own cost a water treatment plant to handle it.
The water will come from a site three miles below the Otowi Bridge, in the extreme northwestern area of Santa Fe County. The water will be conveyed through underground pipelines and a series of booster stations to get to their water-distribution destinations.
Rick Carpenter, senior water resources coordinator for the city of Santa Fe’s Water Division and BDD project manager, said almost all the milestones needed to get the project into the construction phase have been met.
“The design build team has been extremely aggressive and we should have 90 percent of the design package in a week or so,” Carpenter said Monday. The DB team is CH2M Hill and Western Summit Constructors, which will build a diversion structure on the Rio Grande, a raw water lift station, a sand removal facility, 11 miles of raw water pipelines, two booster stations to lift the water about 1,100 feet, the water treatment plant and related facilities, two treated-water pump stations and 15 miles of finished water pipelines connected to the city and county water distribution systems.
The contract calls for the system to be online by 2011.
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Based in Englewood, Colo., with an office in Albuquerque, CH2M was described as a global leader in providing full-service engineering, construction and operation of drinking water infrastructure projects.
Carpenter said most of the permitting hurdles have been surpassed. The project is expecting a final milestone, a National Pollution Discharge Elimination Permit, which will be received soon.
Carpenter said the permit, issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, “has been a long time coming. It is a very important permit.”
He said it will allow the project to return sand back to the river when needed. He said getting that permit will allow ground-breaking and the start of construction about Sept. 10.
Last month, the Interior Board of Land Appeals affirmed a decision by the Bureau of Land Management to grant rights of way across federal lands for the BDD. The decision denied a request for a petition to stay by Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, Los Amigos Bravos and Joni Arends, executive director of CCNS. A major concern all along has been soil and runoff contamination from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. A town hall meeting scheduled for Aug. 26 was expected to zero in on those concerns.
“There is a lot of concern and that was the main reason for the town hall,” Carpenter said. “We would like the opportunity to present the facts and the science designed to deal with contaminants.”
The contamination concern has been ongoing since the beginning of the project. Late last year, Santa Fe County Commissioner Harry Montoya, who was chairman of the BDD governing board at the time, sent a list of “six specific action steps” needed from LANL to address contamination issues.
- The issues addressed:
- Stopping of migration of LANL contaminants to the Rio Grande and groundwater through construction of additional sediment barriers and containment systems.
- Properly monitoring the transport of legacy contaminants (from the 1940s to 1960s) in both surface and groundwater systems.
- Measuring radioactive and toxic contamination of buried post World War II materials in a side channel upstream of the BDD diversion site.
- Providing an early warning system to detect high concentrations of contaminants so that BDD can temporarily stop diversions until the contaminants can move downstream.
- Monitoring to assure contaminants remain at low levels in the diverted raw water and to show that the treated drinking water and sediments removed meet or exceed all state and federal standards.
- Provide funding for the BDD board to retain an independent peer review of matters pertaining to LANL-origin contamination of public water drinking sources.
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Carpenter said LANL’s response was positive. LANL said it already has a system of monitoring wells in place that address numerous springs in White Rock Canyon as well as the Buckman well field, and pledged to enhance the network.
LANL also agreed to a peer review as long as it be allowed to concur with the selection of the peer reviewers.
The laboratory did disagree with the BDD’s reference to laboratory-origin contaminants, saying that there is a substantial contribution of radionuclides from natural or otherwise unidentified sources.
“Our objective is to be open and supportive on questions raised by the BDD Project staff and support their actions to advance this important water-supply project,” LANL said in its response letter. Santa Fe Councilor Rebecca Wurzburger, current BDD board chairman, said in March she is satisfied that the BDD will produce high-quality drinking water and will have the ability to suspend operations when the river has a high amount of sediment, to which contaminants bind.
“In fact, the BDD will meet standards that are 100 times more stringent than the current standards for plutonium and other contaminants of concern due to our proximity to LANL,” she said in an opinion posted on the BDD Web site in March.She also pointed out that the BDD’s main purpose is to provide a reliable, sustainable source of drinking water for current and future generations.
“We must continue to conserve water, and must continue looking for ways to use our limited water resources more efficiently and effectively,” Wurzburger said in her Web posting.
The city of Santa Fe has a good track record in that area. From 1995 to 2007, Sangre de Cristo Water customers reduced their water use by 40 percent — from 168 gallons per capita per day to 101 gpcd by the end of 2007.
The city has accomplished that through a complex set of ordinances and through financial incentives for those who conserve water.
Carpenter said the project is designed mainly to provide relief for the aquifer the area is currently using.
“This is really about sustainability,” Carpenter said. “It will help us quit pumping our wells so hard. (The BDD) is not a new source. “Conservation always will necessarily play a huge role.”
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