Questa water crisis ebbs as village eyes long-term fixes

Paula Trujillo prayed every night for the resolve to deal with a water outage in Questa that left her home and family without running water for more than a month.

“Lord, just give me more patience,” Trujillo said in an interview Jan. 3. “I just want my water back, and I’m sure a lot of people are feeling the same.”

Trujillo said her house on the south side of town lost water pressure Dec. 1, a few days before service to most of the village collapsed. Crews scrambled to drill a new well, which they hoped would put enough water back into the system to restore service. The well was finished Dec. 12, but the process of refilling lines and restoring service has been painstakingly slow, in part because crews were finding new leaks as pipes were refilled.

That delay has tested the patience of many like Trujillo, who say they’ve long raised concerns about inconsistent water service.

“I’ve been complaining about this problem for the last four or five years,” said Trujillo. “This is nothing new.”

Now, as the village slowly gets water to those who are still without it, leaders are looking at what kinds of long-term repairs are needed to keep this from happening again.

The village water system serves about 1,800 people, most of whom were without water for weeks. Questa Mayor Mark Gallegos said Jan. 4 an estimated 100 people were still without water.

“Things are improving, but we’re not 100 percent,” he said.

Early on during the outage, crews realized one of the village’s two wells was not producing enough water to keep the water lines pressurized. Rather than repair that well, the village chose to drill a new well deeper than its predecessor and tie it into the system.

That well is now online and is pumping water, but Gallegos said this week the process of refilling lines and storage tanks has been “a trial.”

In part, that’s because it takes 1 million gallons of water just to refill the lines, Gallegos said. He said the village wells can pump about 200,000 gallons a day, but as people with service continued to use water, it took even longer to repressurize the system. The village then has had to partially refill its 500,000-gallon storage tank to balance pressure across the system.

Plus, crews discovered several leaks that appeared to pop up when lines were refilled. Gallegos said these leaks had to be found, then patched. Crews suspect at least one unidentified leak along Old Red River Road is making it hard to get water back to homes in that area.

It’s not yet clear when that leak might be found and repaired, nor when all residents will have water restored.

‘We’re all learning’

Gallegos said the leaks tend to appear in transite lines — a certain kind of asbestos/cement pipe — which are likely near the end of their useful life.

The mayor said the village has been aware of problems with its water system, but he rejected suggestions that the government ignored them. Instead, he said shoddy record keeping and high turnover in village employees meant a lot of information and project assignments fell through the cracks.

“I don’t think there was any neglect,” Gallegos said. “We took those concerns seriously.”

Gallegos did say the current water crisis has made rehabilitation of an obviously unstable and dated system a priority. He said the village has discovered a lot about how the system works and where improvements are needed.

“People are learning,” Gallegos said. “We’re all learning. I’m learning. And the whole community is going to know how the system works by the end of this.”

Exactly how the village will pay for repairs done during the crisis, let alone deferred maintenance and rehabilitation to prevent another crisis, is still unclear. To date, Gallegos estimates the village owes between $250,000 and $400,000 for emergency work done in the last month alone. Major system upgrades or replacements would no doubt cost millions.

The village has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the state Legislature in the last few years for water and sewer system work. Less than $100,000 of that money is earmarked for water system improvements.

Gallegos said the village can no longer rely on legislators to foot the bill, and he said the village government will likely start looking for grants and loans to pay for system improvements.