Buckman plant avoids shutdown
Water levels at Rio Grande high enough to continue supplying Santa Fe area without tapping into wells
Despite an unrelenting drought, Rio Grande water levels remained high enough for officials to avoid shutting down the Buckman Direct Diversion.
But just barely.
The river is now flowing at 280 cubic feet per second, staying above the crucial 200 cfs. If the flow of water drops below that threshold, it becomes increasingly difficult to divert water from the river to supply the Santa Fe area.
“We might just squeak by,” said Rick Carpenter, the Buckman facilities manager.
The water is high enough to fully submerge the screens that prevent debris and fish from entering the plant’s pumping bays — a basic requirement to keep it operating, Carpenter said.
Even with the lower water levels, Buckman is producing the requisite 6 million to 7 million gallons of treated water per day, Carpenter said.
The river should stay above the shutdown threshold for the next week or two, Carpenter said, adding that if the river’s flow drops significantly, the plant wouldn’t be shut down for much more than a week.
Officials have said a shutdown would not cause a water shortage. Users would receive their water from well fields that have recharged in the years since the Buckman plant began supplying surface water to the area.
Demand for water should drop sharply in the next couple of weeks as the growing season ends, the nights cool down and riparian trees go dormant and absorb less water, said Jesse Roach, the city’s water division director.
The end of the growing season comes as the entire state is in some form of drought condition and most of Santa Fe County is in “exceptional drought,” the most severe level, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor’s Thursday update. That compares with nearly drought-free conditions statewide at this time last year.
Increasing levels of drought have been
creeping across the state since spring. Low levels of rainfall in the spring and summer, combined with a thin mountain snowpack, have led to depleted flows in the state’s waterways.
In August, local water officials thought they would have to halt Buckman’s operations for two to eight weeks by October due to dipping river levels combined with growers’ peak consumption of irrigation water.
The Rio Grande is at one of its lowest levels measured at the Otowi Bridge, near San Ildefonso Pueblo, in the past 50 years, Roach said.
River flow at the bridge determines how much water New Mexico must deliver to Texas to comply with the Rio Grande Compact, Roach said.
Right now, water is running at a near trickle from the Colorado River Basin, Roach said, but a number of spots are boosting the Rio Grande.
They include 150 cfs of water at Embudo, 100 cfs released from the Abiquiú reservoir and some small boosts from the Pojoaque and Santa Cruz rivers and various tributaries, Roach said.
“I thought that the Rio Grande flows would fall farther than they have,” Roach said.
Irrigation water was rationed more this season to growers to keep the river flowing at a high enough level for Buckman to divert, said David Gensler, hydrologist for the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.
Instead of all three areas of the valley being irrigated at once, each section took turns, Gensler said.
“We’ve hung on by a wing and a prayer,” Gensler said.
Carpenter applauded the conservancy for coordinating with other agencies to stretch their water supply further than expected.
“They did a good job of managing the river under challenging conditions,” Carpenter said.
One bright side to the sparse rainfall is that no muddy storm runoff is going into the river, keeping the water clear, Roach said.
The Buckman plant has shut down periodically to keep silt and other debris — particularly high after a fire or storm — from clogging or damaging its systems.
“So we’re not dealing with the sediment issues that have plagued that plant,” Roach said.