Contaminant Creep

The City of Santa Fe's skin in the game lies just south of the chain-link fence, at the Santa Fe Well #1, formerly the Baca Street Well, one of eight wells that feed the city's drinking water supply—and a predominant source for that water before the Buckman Direct Diversion was brought online five years ago. The well has been idled since new contaminants found in area monitoring wells raised concerns about the efficacy of remediation efforts, which sent NMED and PNM back to the negotiating table.

"We just simply want to be able to provide safe water through the Santa Fe Well and utilize that well as part of our system," says Bill Schneider, water resources coordinator for the city. "It's critical to us. So we would just certainly like to see the site next door to this well cleaned up and restored to drinking water quality."

The area has been monitored and the water filtered for trace petroleum hydrocarbons since 1988, when utility customers complained about a bad taste and odor in their water. Testing revealed benzene, among other contaminants. PNM ran a generating station near the site from the 1950s to the 1980s, and roughly 84,000 gallons of fuel oil were spilled there in 1952.

PNM does not acknowledge a connection, though. Its officials declined to be interviewed for this story; instead, in response to repeated requests for comment, they issued a written statement reiterating that the company is working with the state on a new agreement for additional study and cleanup: "PNM made a commitment to investigate, monitor and remediate the Santa Fe Station site and has spent more than $5 million to honor that commitment, even though there is no definitive data as to the source or sources of the groundwater contamination at the site."

The city sees a filtration system installed at Santa Fe Well #1 as part of the remediation, and so when a part broke, it expected PNM to pay to replace it. PNM decided it was not responsible, however. So the well stopped pumping two years ago, and in the interim, it has continued to accumulate contaminants.

The current settlement agreement mandates testing at only a handful of the 32 monitoring wells on the site, and in 2012, Alex Puglisi, source of supply manager for the city's water division, pushed for the additional testing that turned up new substances.

"It's been 23 years since the settlement agreement has been signed, and the only activity that was occurring at the site was quarterly monitoring by PNM, so we have reams and reams of data, but we have nothing to show that there's been any attempt at delineation of the plume and cleanup," Puglisi says. Reports of previously unseen contamination, he claims, led to the question of whether the agreement is effectively addressing the situation.

The revised settlement is expected to include provisions for a new site investigation, and there's hope it will speed progress toward remediation.

"A full characterization needs to be done at that site, and they need to get a handle on exactly what is going on, and the wells they were monitoring were not telling them the story," Puglisi says. "Our concern is that we don't want contamination to linger or spread."

A draft agreement has been circulating since March but remains unsigned. Because the contaminants found were petroleum byproducts—benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene—the state-supported Petroleum Corrective Action Fund may shoulder a portion of the cleanup costs moving forward.

"We have been working diligently on this for years," reads a statement from NMED, "and look forward to the future completion of the cleanup at the Baca site enabled by the Corrective Action Fund."

The question of contaminant sources has been a "political hot potato," says John Hawley, who authored a report on the site's hydrogeology that was partially funded by PNM. That fuel spilled at the generating station reached the well is "not debatable," Hawley says. "But then also clearly stated in the report is that there are other contaminants in the well that there is no known source of on the PNM property itself."

Hawley's report illuminates "Mother Nature's plumbing" in the area, he says, in addition to the effects people have had through structures like the acequia system, which may have aided in moving substances around. Other contaminants could have come from the string of businesses on nearby St. Francis Drive and Cerrillos Road, a neighboring highway transportation center, and even from industrial activity at the Railyard during the Manhattan Project.

Hawley's recommendation is to decommission the well. If the city wants to add another well, for a cost of roughly $1.2 million, he suggests less problematic sites along Buckman Road and Rincon de Torreon Drive, near the old landfill.

But the city isn't giving up on the well yet.

"I don't think we have concerns that this can't be treated and restored to drinking water quality," Schneider says. "It's just a matter of when."

The city's goal is to use groundwater as a drought reserve, a reliable supply when there isn't enough snow to run on surface water from the watershed or Rio Grande. The well near Baca Street has historically produced 350,000 to 400,000 gallons per day.

"At times of need, we need to have the ability to run these wells at full capacity," Schneider says. "So we're very interested in seeing the area around the Santa Fe Well restored so we don't have any concerns that we can operate that well to its full permitted capacity."

Santa Fe Reporter