Clean water is at a premium around the world and in New Mexico. Nothing, in the long run, is more valuable. It is irreplaceable. To clean dirty water so it’s drinkable again takes huge amounts of energy and staggering costs.

 

That’s why the thought of jet fuel from Kirtland Air Force Base contaminating the aquifer around the Ridgecrest neighborhood in Albuquerque is so appalling. The area is near some of the city’s most important wells. And Albuquerque still uses only well water from the aquifer to drink and run the water systems of the city, though that should change soon when the San Juan-Chama Project sends river water into our pipelines.

 

But that’s not reassuring either. There’s a very real possibility that the Rio Grande itself is being continually contaminated by industrial and even radioactive waste from more than 60 years of operations at the Los Alamos National Laboratories. Canyons that drain the Pajarito Plateau where LANL resides have been used by the lab for decades as dumping grounds. And those canyons all run into the river.

 

If a region allows its water to be befouled, it’s ruined not only its prospects for good heath, but fatally undermined the foundations of its economy.

 

Along with sunlight, uncontaminated water of all kinds, potable or ocean brine, is essential to the living world as we know it. There’s no doubt of that.

 

Judging from years of news reports, it seems possible that Albuquerque and certain parts of the rest of New Mexico are on the brink of a dirty water crisis.

 

To clean the water under Ridgecrest Drive and make it drinkable, the city, the federal government – somebody – is going to have to fork out many millions of dollars to clean it with reverse osmosis, a kind of environmental dialysis. Simple pumping water, treating it, and pumping it back into the aquifer to be pumped out again and treated in a nearly endless cycle won’t do the job.

 

The Kirtland jet fuel leak is by no means the only example of the pollution of Albuquerque’s aquifer. We really have no complete idea of how dirty our water is in places. We know that the Superfund Site around the GE plant in the South Valley has a plume of toxic chemicals in it that will take probably another twenty years to clean up. We know another Superfund Site in the South Valley, a railroad creosote plant, is at the beginning of a long clean up.

 

Thirteen years ago, 1995, the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry reported that it found over 150 “documented ground-water contamination events” had contaminated what it said were “vast amounts” of groundwater in Bernalillo County, degrading its “usefulness as drinking water.” More than 20 of those 150 contamination sites should become Super Fund sites, the Registry said. To my knowledge, none of them have undergone the beginnings of a clean up process.

 

And there’s an indication Sandia National Laboratories might be more of a pollution risk than anyone thought in the past. Its mixed waste landfill, a toxic dump in land above the Mesa del Sol development, caused controversy and concern. Some want it moved, but Sandia has said it is too dangerous to move and has capped it. The accuracy of monitoring wells around the site have been questioned. But that might not be the worst of it. In 2002 the state levied what is called a “determination of an imminent and substantial endangerment to health and the environment” against Sandia. In its findings of fact, the state contended that the Department of Energy and Sandia “have disposed of materials, including hazardous waste and hazardous constituents, in pits, trenches, landfills and waste piles throughout the facility.” Sandia has already cleaned up a two-acre Chemical Waste Landfill that contained chemicals and potentially explosive wastes deposited there from l962-1985. But the state’s agreement with Sandia did not include radioactive waste sites. One wonders why.

 

Clean water is under attack from many fronts, including the urge to drill for oil and gas and to leach uranium out of drinking water as so-called solutions to the current energy crisis and global warming mess.

 

The great Galisteo Basin oil and gas exploration boom was derailed for a while by Santa Fe County with the concurrence of the governor recently because explorations would have been carried out through an aquifer that feeds wells that have supplied water for most of Santa Fe’s recent rapid growth. While new technologies make oil drilling cleaner than before, oil exploration always involves dredging up huge quantities of brine, and comes with contaminated runoff from cleaning rigs and vehicles, engine lubricants, anti-freeze, benzine, drilling fluid and the like. It’s not that oil producers want to contaminate water, but pollution mistakes and accidents are an inevitable part of their business. And as clean water is irreplaceable, it is more important than any oil that might be found by drilling through it.

 

And now President Bush has lifted the ban on offshore drilling, endangering the habitat of countless coastal creatures, and further threatening tourist industries that flourish around those ocean waters. This will have no impact whatsoever on the current oil price crisis. The oil industry in America has already drilled and capped countless good wells for future profits. Why don’t they open them up?

 

If clean water is the most valuable of all minerals to human life, why would anyone allow mining for other minerals to take place in pristine aquatic environments? To even consider leaching uranium, with all is polluting industrial and radioactive byproducts, from the sole source of drinking water for 15,000 Navajos around Crownpoint, New Mexico, is like dropping a bowl of soup on a filthy floor and expecting someone to eat it. I hope the Navajos can stop it.