In a drought stricken, arid state like ours, one that relies almost totally on underground water for drinking and other domestic and business uses, you’d think we would know, down to the gallon, how much water we actually have. It might also be a safe bet to assume we’d know how much of that water is clean and potable, how much of it has been polluted and how much it will cost to make it drinkable again. Unhappily, what we know about our aquifers is still so scant and vague it might fit into a handful of government-issue thimbles. It doesn’t help either that groundwater is invisible and bound up in unique geological formations that make such analyses devilishly hard and expensive.
So, it was with a dose of optimism that many of us last month greeted the long awaited, data-rich New Mexico 50-Year Water Action Plan.
New Mexico hasn’t had a comprehensive water plan in recent memory. Thinking about water has been relegated to 16 water planning regions, the Interstate Stream Commission, the Office of the State Engineer, the U.S. Supreme Court and a gordian tangle of federal and state laws, interstate compacts and lawsuits almost as complicated as the hydrologic realities they seek to regulate.
While stimulating doubts and many questions, the new Water Action Plan is important and necessary. It’s something to work with and evolve. Its chief problem for me is that it doesn’t prioritize solving the indisputable existential water crisis in the state — ground water pollution. The plan does allude to cleaning up ground water, but I’m left with the feeling that the task is seen as being so enormous, so costly and so fraught with political landmines that it will continue to be put on the back burner for decades.
The Water Action Plan has many admirable qualities to be sure. A news release from the Office of the Governor enumerates the Plan’s “key provisions” as including: “a water education campaign to reduce community water consumption by 10%”; “…incentivizing modern irrigation technology to reduce agricultural water use by 20%”; “deploying cutting-edge technology to complete a statewide water loss inventory”; “creating billions of gallons of new water” from oil and gas drilling waste; creating a more stringent “surface water discharge permitting program to keep rivers, streams, and lakes clean”; and protecting watersheds by “investing in reforesting and managing forests to protect water supplies and reduce the threat of wildfires.” The Plan will also “adopt policies” to “improve ground water mapping and monitoring,” a crucial step in furthering knowledge of our water supply. It will work to modernize waste treatment plants and “stormwater” infrastructure. And finally the plan mentions the “clean up” of “contaminated groundwater sites” as one of its “priority actions,” a hyperbolic designation that all the Plan’s initiatives share.
It’s common knowledge among people who care about water that many of New Mexico’s aquifers are profoundly polluted. The sources of contamination include mining and mineral processing, oil and gas drilling all over the state but especially in the Permian and San Juan basins, various industrial Superfund sites in major population centers, leaking gasoline storage tanks, decrepit septic systems, R and D work at Sandia National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and every military installation in the state including, of course, Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque with its gigantic jet fuel spill.
No one still knows even approximately how much of the water in our underground “savings account” has been ruined though the unconscionable laxity of environmental regulation in our state. It will take millions of dollars to find out, and an almost miraculous revolution in our political will to do so. But no water plan can be deemed realistic without such knowledge.
When it comes to creating a “new water supply,” the idea of the state paying oil and gas polluters to clean up and reuse their dirty water has drawn much criticism. And rightly so. It’s preposterous to think that it’s the taxpayer’s job to subsidize fossil fuel corporations. To think otherwise is to be the victim of a scam that wants us to trade gross pollution for minor taxes on even grosser profits.
Implicit in creating a “new water supply” are the dangers and costs of desalinating enormous quantities of New Mexico’s presumed “ocean” of brackish water that is thought to underlie most of the potable aquifers in the state. The plan doesn’t say so, but that’s the only source of “new water” we have. Desalinization requires expensive power plants, perhaps even portable nuclear reactors. It also creates mountains of salty wastes that are a hazard to agriculture, wildlife and public health. They would have to be moved safely and stored in stable geological settings, if they can be found.
I applaud New Mexico’s new Water Action Plan, but, please, let’s get our priorities straight.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Very well written and researched article! Thank you so much! Agua es Vida.
The NM Environment Department had the opportunity to order Sandia Labs to clean up the Mixed Waste Landfill. Sandia was ready, willing and able to do so. Sandia just needed the go ahead. Instead the Environment Department chose to still allow the toxic radioactive and chemicals to continue to seep toward and into the ABQ aquifer.