BDD News
Opinion
You Can Drink Our Water with Confidence
By Harry Montoya, Chair,
Buckman Direct Diversion Board
County Commissioner, District 1, Santa Fe County
And Rebecca Wurzburger, Vice-Chair
Buckman Direct Diversion Board
Santa Fe City Councilor, District 2
You can turn on the tap and confidently fill a glass with drinking water. Our drinking water meets all applicable standards now, and we will continue to make sure that our drinking water meets these standards in the future.
Recently, concerns have been reported about the safety of our drinking water supplies being threatened by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) contaminants such as plutonium. These are serious concerns. All drinking water systems should protect the quality of their water sources from threats of contamination. In the Santa Fe region, LANL contaminants pose an unusual concern that we must be vigilant in understanding, monitoring and addressing.
The Buckman Direct Diversion (BDD) project needs to address this issue from two standpoints: 1) buried contaminants such as plutonium near the site of our diversion facility; and 2) contaminants such as plutonium in canyon sediments on the Pajarito Plateau that are connected to LANL watersheds and waste discharges. These sediments can be transported by flowing water from storms or high snowmelts into the Rio Grande.
The buried contaminants were deposited in the 1940s through the 1960s in a former slough, which was a side channel to the Rio Grande before it got completely filled in during floods in the 1950s and 1960s. The contaminants were reported by the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) in May 2007, however the NMED concluded that these contaminants pose no immediate health risks.
In fact, someone would have dig down to the contaminants, build a house on them, and live in that house, day-in and day-out, for 25 years to be at risk for a health problem. Even then, the risk would be minimal.
However, we know that the area where the buried contaminants were found is specific, and we will be required to avoid it under our permit with the U.S. Forest Service. Construction and operation of the BDD diversion facilities, raw water pump station, and pipelines will be in areas where the sediment does not contain these contaminants. We are confident we will be able to avoid the contaminated slough sediments and that they will remain intact, buried underground.
While we just recently found out about the buried contaminants near the BDD diversion site, we have known about the contaminants in canyon sediments such as the Pajarito Plateau, which are tributaries to the Rio Grande, for some time. During normal conditions, these sediments stay in the canyons. However when water “scours” the canyons during high runoff events such as storms or snowmelt, the sediments can be stirred up and transported in the flowing water.
The risk from LANL contaminants is relatively low compared to natural background radiation. LANL states that a the member of the public who receives the most exposure is receiving less than one-fiftieth of the amount of radiation we receive in Santa Fe from natural background radiation sources such as cosmic radiation.
Still, this remains a valid concern that we took into account when designing the Buckman Direct Diversion Project. We selected a water treatment system that is the best available technology for removal of contaminants such as plutonium, which bind tightly to sediment particles and are removed during treatment. In addition to standard treatment processes, the system selected for the BDD will use an additional filter system which will remove even very small particles from the water by filtering the water through extremely small pores in the walls of hollow fiber membranes. This filter system will be an additional layer of treatment to remove contaminants such as plutonium.
Also, the BDD is designed to stop diverting water when the Rio Grande has high amounts of suspended solids (to which contaminants of concern are tightly bound) and resume diversion after this kind of temporary “spike” has flowed downstream.
There is more we can do. We plan to join NMED Secretary Ron Curry in calling for LANL to develop an early warning system that would let BDD staff know when they need to temporarily stop diverting river water. We feel this system is needed. We agree that LANL can and should do much more to stop contaminant migration and improve monitoring of contaminant migration and transport.
With all these issues and others, there is a tremendous benefit to bringing the BDD on-line. When we implement the BDD project, we will have more flexibility. If we have a problem with one of our drinking water sources, we can turn to another. This flexibility is an important part of having a safe, reliable drinking water supply for decades to come.
While the Buckman Direct Diversion Project did not create the issue of LANL-contamination, it is an issue we will deal with now and in the future. We thank Secretary Curry and the NMED for monitoring sediment near the river to assure the safety of our people and our environment. We certainly need to develop a better understanding of these issues, and we will continue to do so. We will work with LANL to develop appropriate measures to address these concerns, and call on LANL to be completely and publicly transparent in the systems they propose and the information they offer to us and to the public.
Water is life. We all deserve and should expect drinking water that looks good, smells good, tastes good and is good for us. The Buckman Direct Diversion Project is committed to delivering this water to the City of Santa Fe and Santa Fe County, whenever anyone turns on the tap.