Albuquerque’s water conservation success continues

Albuquerque’s Rio Grande drinking water diversion

Customers of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Authority used 33.5 billion gallons of water in 2012, according to the Utility’s year-end report to the New Mexico Office of State Engineer. That is down about 1 percent from last year’s 33.8 billion gallons. It’ll be a while yet before wet get firm numbers, but it appears that will again mean per capital water usage (all water use in the community – residential, business, parks etc. divided by the number of people) of less than 150 gallons per person per day, according to Katherine Yuhas, the Water Utility’s conservation officer.

43 percent of that water came from the city’s San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project, which diverts imported river water for municipal use rather than pumping groundwater. While the shift away from river water is allowing our aquifer to recover (see here for a story I did a year ago on that subject – the trends have continued since then), the total produced by the river water project has so far fallen short of goals set by the Water Utility when the project was launched.

I’ll have more on that issue in Tuesday’s newspaper.