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Thursday, May 15, 2008

Moriarty Looks To Deepen Wells

By Laura Nesbitt
Mountain View Telegraph
      Moriarty may be drilling deeper for more water.
       Next week city attorney Chuck DuMars and Mayor Adan Encinias will meet with officials from the State Engineer's Office to find out if the city's existing water rights allow officials to deepen wells, or if Moriarty will need to buy and transfer water rights into a deeper aquifer, DuMars said.
       “We're getting nothing in the Valley Fill,” DuMars told councilors at a special meeting of the Moriarty City Council on April 22.
       Three aquifers including the Valley Fill lie under the Estancia Basin — one on top of the other, the attorney told councilors.
       “It's just a bathtub,” DuMars said.
       Before a closed door session in which no action was taken, DuMars told councilors that drilling existing city wells deeper would not affect shallower domestic wells because the city would case a well for the first 300 feet.
       At the April meeting, Public Works Supervisor Mike Tapia said a test hole was drilled in between Wells 1 and 2, wells that were drilled in the 1960s that have basically run out of water.
       The city has 850,000 gallons in water storage along with three other wells so there is no danger that Moriarty could run out of water, Tapia said.
       DuMars said he was confident that there are existing water rights available, although he was not sure what the price to the city might be.
       “I think that it's really good that the city is getting ahead of the curve instead of waiting for a demand to occur and then trying to find water. It's being proactive,” DuMars said.
       Homestead Water Co. in Moriarty — which serves Homestead Estates north of the Moriarty city limits — may also consider drilling a deeper well.
       Nitrate levels have fluctuated in the utility's water for the last nine months, said Dennis Wallin, an owner of the company that was built in the mid-1980s. In fact, for the past five or six years the company has noticed fluctuating nitrate levels, Wallin said.
       “There is no risk to adults. There is only risk to pregnant women and children,” Wallin said.
       High levels of nitrate in drinking water is a common problem in New Mexico, according to Wallin, because nitrates are normally higher in farming areas because of fertilizers.
       As soon as Homestead received water samples showing nitrate levels in excess of the nitrate standard, the utility notified its 75 residential customers, Wallin.
       The company recommends all its customers buy reverse osmosis systems to take care of the problem.
       Homestead Water Company is examining several options to fix the problem including identifying the source of the nitrate, tapping into another well that the company owns about a quarter mile away, a reverse osmosis system or ionization process for the well itself, or lowering and recasing the current well, Wallin said.
       “We're going to get it fixed. We will be testing the other well. We have to file an action plan with New Mexico Environment Department in (the next) 14 days,” Wallin said.
      

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