Taos Ski Valley: Water OK to drink
Repairs to municipal water system slated for next week
The Village of Taos Ski Valley’s week of water woes appeared to reach a pinnacle last week, when officials were forced to issue a precautionary boil water advisory on Wednesday (Jan. 4) as a result of the partial depressurization of its municipal water system.
Saturday (Jan. 7), however, Village officials confirmed in an email “there is no contamination in the Village water system,” adding, “beliefs to the contrary are false.”
Public safety officers have bottles of water available for distribution, according to the Village, and bulk water sources can be provided. Residents are advised to contact the non-emergency police department number at 575-7762815 for assistance, and leave a message.
“Officers should respond within an hour,” the Village said in an email, “otherwise, call Taos County non-emergency dispatch at (575) 758-3361.”
“The Village system is served by the best source of water in the state and is treated and tested to ensure it remains the best,” the email reads. “The Village has a simple gravity-fed delivery system without many service loops that make tracking down and fixing the water loss issue an additional challenge.”
The system, which lost pressure on Dec. 28 during one of the busiest times of Taos Ski Valley, Inc.’s ski season had not been restored as of press time Wednesday (Jan. 11).
A spokesperson for the ski corporation told the Taos News that the company has been receiving “daily updates from the Village, [just] as other Village residents and businesses have,” and emphasized that Taos Ski Valley, Inc. will provide any assistance it can during the water crisis.
“As with any utility outage, these outages do impact our business,” the spokesperson said.
“We’ve notified the Village that we are ready, willing, and able to assist in any way with any request they have.”
Although many users of the municipal water system continued to have at least some water over the past two weeks, Taos News has received reports that some residents in the upper reaches of the village have not had domestic water for days or longer. Residents, however, declined to speak to the Taos News about their experience.
A recent water study determined that the Village’s water system has an average water loss rate of between 70 and 80 percent, with the highest amount of unaccounted-for water occurring during peak tourist season in the winter, when the system experiences the most demand. The aging system is riddled with leaks, which the Village has been gearing up to address in collaboration with Taos
Ski Valley, Inc.
Public works crews identified the source of a major leak, Village officials said in an evening email last Wednesday evening (Jan. 4), at the same time the municipality advised people that the New Mexico Environment Department recommends issuing a precautionary boil water advisory when system pressure fails to a degree that air becomes trapped in the lines.
Village Clerk Ann Marie Wooldridge emphasized to the Taos News at the time that, while the state recommendation may have sounded “dire, it is just something that NMED requires us to issue.”
“The New Mexico Environment Department’s Drinking Water Bureau recommended that the Village of Taos Ski Valley’s water system issue a precautionary boil advisory due to the water outage,” an Environment Department
spokesperson told the Taos News last week, shortly before the Village announced that testing had confirmed the water was safe to drink. “Water systems are responsible for issuing these types of advisories to their consumers when incidents like this occur. Consumers should boil their water until the Village of Taos Ski Valley’s water system resumes normal operations and sampling results confirm their water quality.”
A single, unspecified property was initially blamed for the majority of the water loss.
“The loss of water at that property was estimated at 200,000 gallons a day for approximately three days,” according to the Village. “The total storage capacity of each of the Village’s water tanks is 250,000 gallons. This leak, along with the heavy demand during the holiday season, ex-hydrated the system so that large air pockets formed through the lines. Residents and businesses may have experienced air pockets in their water service.
“Since the first major leak was corrected,” the Village added, “public works crews have discovered and stopped three other points of loss in private service lines to help build up pressure again.”
The Village noted last week that, because of the water line failure, pumps at the Kachina storage tank went dry and were damaged. Nonetheless, the Village said at the time, the system could be pressurized without use of the pumps.
Per the Village’s latest update this week, construction equipment was scheduled to arrive by Friday (Jan. 13), so crews could begin excavating a main water line on Twining Road.
Crews originally planned to start work on Twining Road on Wednesday, with the hope that work would be completed within a week and the Village “core” set to be without water for a brief time around midday, Jan. 19. The village said in a subsequent email, however, that “further investigation of the Twining water line leak indicates that creating a temporary bypass is possible while making repairs and upgrading the line for additional valve installation.”
“The hope is that, with the bypass process, a core water outage might be avoided,” the Village said. “The work on the water line is now planned to start Monday, Jan. 16 for the initial repair. The Village understands that this emergency construction is a further inconvenience; however, until the major leak in the line is addressed, building pressure in the higher elevations of the water system is impossible.”
While construction on Twining Road is underway, only one lane will be open to traffic. The Village asks motorists to take extra precautions and follow safety warnings if they must travel on Twining Road.