New City Water Plant Will Treat 90 Million Gallons a Day
By Dan McKay
Journal Staff Writer
Albuquerque's water is ancient. Wells stationed across the city pump water that has sat underground for hundreds or even thousands of years. And for the most part, the water from the aquifer requires little treatment before flowing through your tap.
Two years from now, that will change.
The city-county water utility plans to tap a new source— river water, fed by snowmelt in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico.
The switch has left some people anxious: How will the water taste? Is it safe to drink?
The utility is building a $172 million treatment plant to address those questions.
"My family is drinking this water, and I want to make sure it's safe for my family, too," said John Stomp, water resources manager. "I think we've designed a plant that is not only going to be safe, but it's the best technology available today."
The treatment plant is under construction at Renaissance Center, near Osuna and Chappell NE. It's expected to come on line in summer 2008.
Anxiety among activists over the quality of the water has mostly focused on reports of pharmaceuticals in the river, storm runoff that picks up bacteria before ending up in the river and radioactive contaminants from Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In interviews, Stomp and another expert, civil engineering professor Bruce Thomson, suggested those concerns are overblown.
"The quality of the water in the river is excellent," said Thomson, who works at the University of New Mexico and serves on a local water advisory board. "It has very low— almost undetectable— concentrations of any contaminant that is regulated for drinking water."
The utility could shut off the diversion when there's storm runoff, but even if it doesn't, the treatment plant should remove contaminants, Thomson said.
The river water comes from snowmelt and is "very clean," Stomp said. "There's not a lot of industry upstream."
The headwaters of the Rio Grande are in southwestern Colorado. Upstream of the Albuquerque diversion are waste-water discharges from Española, Bernalillo and Rio Rancho— all regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The utility has been monitoring the water and hasn't seen significant levels of radionuclides or pharmaceuticals, Stomp said.
The river water is to be tested before, during and after the treatment process, he said.
"One blessing that we have is that the water in the Rio Grande is really not much different chemically than the water in the aquifer," Stomp said. "The aquifer is Rio Grande water that was trapped 10,000 years ago."
Customers could get a preview of the water. The utility plans to build a pilot treatment plant to test different chemicals for the purification process. Construction is expected to be finished late this summer.
Some of that water could be bottled and handed out to give people a taste of the future.
As for the real thing, certain neighborhoods will get the river water first. The utility wants to bring only parts of the water system on line at a time.
"We'll integrate the surface water over time," Stomp said.
In some cases, customers will get a blend of river and ground water.
Eventually, the plant will treat about 90 million gallons a day. Construction is about 40 percent complete.
"It's a combination of old technology that's been around for a hundred years in terms of water treatment and the best high tech that's available on the market today," Stomp said.
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