By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
With water flows from the San Felipe Springs decreased to levels not seen in decades, city officials are urgently seeking new water sources, city council members learned.
Del Rio City Council members during their Oct. 10 meeting listened to a presentation on efforts underway to find a new water source or sources for the city.
Assistant Public Works Director Greg Velasquez told the council at the start of the presentation he wanted to inform the council about recent efforts to find an alternate water source and noted two locations are being studied closely: one just north of the San Felipe Springs and one in the Jap Lowe Estates area on the east side of the city.
Later in the meeting, Velasquez told the council the flows of the San Felipe Springs have decreased by tens of millions of gallons per day to levels not seen in decades.
Velasquez also introduced Mark Roetzel, principal with MRoetzel Consulting, LLC, of San Antonio, an engineering consultant who told the council he has been working with the city for 20 to 25 years.
“More recently, within the last 10 years or so, we’ve been looking at alternate groundwater opportunities, alternate water supply opportunities, focusing on groundwater,” Roetzel told the council.
Roetzel said in 2015 he completed a study looking at the three existing wells the city has, all located in north Del Rio or slightly north of the city limits: the Agarita well, the Hackberry well and the Hamilton well.
“At least one of those wells, Agarita, cannot be used as a public water supply, because, like the San Felipe Springs, it’s under the influence of groundwater, and it would require a filtration plant similar to the current water treatment plant,” Roetzel said.
“Hackberry has not been used for years, primarily because it was developed (drilled) in a formation that’s high in sulfur, and so it’s not a potable quality. It probably also is under surface influence, and we are currently evaluating the Hamilton well,” he added.
Roetzel said he is waiting on one or more “large rain events” that will trigger turbidity in the San Felipe Springs and said those events will give him more data on the water in the Hamilton well at the same time.
Roetzel said an ongoing regional drought has decreased the flow of water from the San Felipe Springs, the city’s current and only source of drinking water. He said the city is working on several different initiatives to obtain alternate water sources.
“One is to coordinate with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), so that in the event of an emergency situation where we cannot use the pumps at San Felipe Springs because of the continuing decline in the water level, where we could temporarily activate one or more of those northern wells, probably Agarita, and provide some temporary disinfection, and some temporary protections to ensure that that is a safe water supply, and then, on a temporary basis, integrate that into the city’s water system,” Roetzel said.
Roetzel spoke about a recently-completed groundwater study to “look at where we can likely find groundwater that is not under surface influence.”
He spoke about the different geological formations that underlie Del Rio and how those affect the amount and the quality of water in and immediately north of the city.
Roetzel said the city is also looking at drilling a new well on property the city owns immediately north of the water treatment plant, on the site of an old archery range. He said although the water drawn from that well might be expected to contain some bacteriological contamination because of “surface influence,” water from that well could easily be pumped to the city’s nearby water treatment plant.
“The treatment plant has a more than adequate capacity. . . , somewhere in the range or slightly above 20 million gallons per day, (which is) more than the maximum city demand. So a well in the vicinity of the water treatment plant would then allow us to have another independent source of supply water into the treatment plant and then of course from the treatment plant, the infrastructure is already in place to distribute the water north up to the Bedell tanks and then farther to the elevated Agarita storage tanks going north,” Roetzel said.
Another well site the city is considering is on a 12-acre tract of land the city owns in the Jap Lowe Estates.
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