City Dumps 2 Million Gallons from Vandalized Water Tank

 

September 10, 2003
By Christopher Schurtz

Two million gallons of water were released into a dirt holding pond east of Sonoma Ranch on Monday morning after vandals broke into a city water tank Sunday.

Water Resources Administrator Gilbert Morales said samples of the water were taken to determine if any contamination occurred.

“If we even suspect the water may have been contaminated, we’re going to isolate it and drain it. We’re not going to take the risk of somebody getting sick,” Morales said.

The labs the samples were sent to are out of state, and the city wouldn’t have got the samples back quickly enough to get the water tank back on-line, as the city needed to do as soon as possible, Morales said.

Despite state-wide drought conditions and a depleted Rio Grande that led to significant cutbacks in the amount of water farmers were allotted this season for irrigation, Morales said releasing the water was the only realistic option.

“The tank is isolated and there was no way to move the water easily where someone could have used it,” Morales said, adding it would have taken a week for the water to be moved by truck.

Two million gallons of water is enough to irrigate six to seven acres of land — irrigation water is measured in acre feet, and it takes 325,900 gallons to cover one acre of land with a foot of water.

“Granted, it was a waste of water. But our primary concern was public health and safety,” Morales said.

Because the water tank is just one of several that drive the gravity-fed, interconnected system, the water from the tank could have ended up in the whole system, rather than be isolated to the East Mesa area.

An on-site alarm system alerted the city of the break-in to the water tank, and the Las Cruces Police Department is working on finding the person or persons who cut the locks on the water tank.

“It’s very difficult to say who it may have been. We do have some vandalism at the remote sites, but sometimes it’s difficult to catch anybody,” Morales said.

Utilities Director Jorge Garcia said this is the first time since he’s been with the city that an incident like this has happened, where water had to be released due to potential contamination.

Garcia said the city had to get the tank back in service as quickly as possible, and even the nearby Sonoma Ranch golf course was too far away to transport the water there.

The city uses between 30 and 33 million gallons a day during its peak summer months, Garcia said, so the loss of 2 million gallons did not affect the system or city users.

“It is a lot of water and we’re not happy about having to do that,” Garcia said. “Maybe we could have used it, but we wanted to make sure we got the water tank back on-line.”

Garcia said even with the post-Sept. 11 climate, he hasn’t seen any federal legislation requiring increased fines for contaminating a city’s water supply. He said the city has hired a consultant to determine the vulnerability of its water system.

While initial testing done by the city indicated no bacterial contamination of the water, Garcia said the rest of the test results will be reported by the end of the week.

Christopher Schurtz can be reached at cschurtz@lcsun-news.com

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