Where Will the Water Come From? One of Santa Fe’s most common questions could find an answer with a proposed return flow pipeline
vation and planning efforts, found the energy to launch another significant project to take full advantage of its San Juan-Chama water, after completing an expensive diversion project to pipe the Rio Grande into city homes just over a decade ago. As it stands on paper, the San Juan-Chama
Communities on the Santa Fe River, downstream from the city—and the wastewater treatment facility—rely on the effluent for agriculture and sustaining ecosystems. Many balk at the idea that a water source, which has been depleted over time, would be further endangered by the project. That leaves them questioning the need for the pipeline. Like the City of Santa Fe, those communities are feeling the intersecting pressures of climate change and drought on their livelihood.
Return Flow Pipeline would divert the city’s effluent back to the Rio Grande, enabling the Buckman Direct Diversion to extract an equivalent volume for later use. Still in the planning phase, the project faces several hurdles—and significant disagreement over its design.
The southern reaches of the upper Colorado River Basin supply the San JuanChama Project. They’ll probably see the largest impacts of the pipeline project, says Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist with Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Institute. According to his preliminary research, since 2000, the basin as a whole has seen a flow reduction of roughly 20%, but the San Juan River has dropped 30%.
BY WILLIAM MELHADO w i l l i a m @ s f r e p o r t e r. c o m
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MAY 18-24, 2022
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SFREPORTER.COM
The proposed 17-mile pipeline would transfer treated effluent from the city’s wastewater treatment facility to the Rio Grande, which would enable the city to extract an equal volume of water upstream for use by municipal residents.
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HROMO, COLORADO — A gray blanket mutes the normally green, vibrant mountains of southern Colorado where the Navajo River carves a path just miles from the New Mexico border. The suffocating smoke from a string of raging forest fires provides the most pressing evidence that the region’s climate is changing. A less visible, yet similarly immediate threat lies beneath the surface of the Oso Diversion Dam, 10 minutes up a dirt road parallel to the Navajo River. That’s where some of Santa Fe’s water comes from, diverted through pipes, across the border and, eventually, winding up in the Rio Grande. Water in the tributaries of the Colorado River Basin travels up to 28 miles, through a series of tunnels before reaching the Azotea Outlet, where it flows down Willow Creek into Heron Reservoir. Together, the city and county of Santa Fe annually purchase 5,605 acre-feet of this San Juan-Chama Project water, but given the recently diminishing flows it’s been a number of years since Santa Fe actually received the agreed-upon amount. Six of the past eight years have seen shortages in San Juan-Chama water New Mexico can use, ranging from 96% of the original allocation one year to 66%, which comes to 3,700 acre-feet for the city and county, in 2021. Those shortages, driven by the ruinous tangle of drought and climate change, are a harbinger of what’s likely to come. The reduced flows have prompted municipalities across the Southwest to react, some more aggressively than others. Santa Fe, largely seen as a leader in water conser-
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