Water Quality
Surface Water Quality
The BDD Project is committed to ensuring a safe and sustainable surface water supply from the Rio Grande for the Santa Fe community. The BDD Board has been active on many fronts to assure drinking water produced by the BDD Project meets all safe drinking water standards, and scientifically demonstrate that drinking water is safe with respect to LANL environmental pollution in order to improve customer confidence.
The BDD Board advocates that the New Mexico Water Quality Control Commission adopt the New Mexico Environment Department’s proposed standards and criteria for LANL contaminants in the Rio Grande upstream from Cochiti Reservoir so that agencies and consumers have an official public benchmark for their interpretation of water quality information in the future when the Rio Grande becomes the main source of Santa Fe’s public drinking water supply.
The absence of specific health-based standards for these man-made radionuclides makes interpretation difficult or impossible for most consumers, particularly because the lack of a standard can provide an opportunity for misinterpretation. The health-based standards are needed for the source of our drinking water so that simple comparison of water quality with standards will answer the question: does the source water contain harmful substances in harmful amounts?
As stewards of the only drinking water system directly affected by LANL’s radionuclide environmental contamination, the BDD Board also supports NMED’s standard to designate the Rio Grande above the Cochiti Reservoir as a public water supply.
The BDD Board’s support of the New Mexico Environment Department’s (NMED) 2009 Triennial Review of Water Quality Standards is outlined in the Direct Technical Testimony on behalf of the BDD Board.
In a 2007 letter, the BDD Board requested six actions of the Department of Energy (DOE) and LANL to protect the BDD Project from LANL pollution. The BDD asked LANL to stop or minimize the migration of LANL-origin contaminants to the Rio Grande. Migration occurs via storm water erosion and transport of sediments, which contain adhered contaminants. The NMED has ordered LANL to take steps to reduce contaminated sediment transport in Los Alamos and Pueblo Canyons. These mandatory measures will help realize the BDD’s goal to stop or minimize migration of these contaminants. The BDD Board believes that there are other practical steps that LANL could and should take that would reduce this storm water problem.
In October 2009, the BDD Board sent a letter asking for a Memorandum of Understanding with the BDD Project describing the DOE and LANL commitments with regard to the six action steps, including an updated status of the six action steps as of September 2009. The current status is summarized in the next section, BDD Asks LANL to Ensure Water Quality.