It's clear gold
City’s water woes ease when drillers hit huge aquifer

A tall drill stands out against the sky Wednesday morning as crews drill for water just south of I-40 near the Indian Hills neighborhood in Gallup. This is the second drilling operation for the crew, having completed drilling into for water across the road from Indian Hills Elementary school. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff writer

GALLUP — Eureka! Rosebrough 1 has hit water.

No, not the former mayor of Gallup; the test well in Indian Hills named after former Mayor Bob Rosebrough that’s tied to G-22, the water project officials hope will help tide the city over until the much heralded Navajo-Gallup pipeline arrives.

City Manager Gerald Herrera and Gallup Joint Utilities Director Lance Allgood confirmed the news earlier this week.

For all the project’s import, neither city official expressed much surprise at the news. Project planners fully expected to find water at the site, between Indian Hills Elementary School and the Red Rock Six movie theaters. The real questions they’re after are how much, and how good.

Allgood said they won’t have many answers until the contractor doing the actual drilling and testing, United Drilling Inc., turns in its report at least three months from now.

In the meantime, United Drilling will be working on Rosebrough 2, a second test well a mile northwest of the first, between Route 66 and Interstate 40. Drilling there is already under way.

If successful, both wells will tap the San Andreas-Glorietta aquifer. The city had planned on drilling closer to Fort Wingate at first, but decided it could improve its chances of a successful test by moving the sites into the city. By drilling near the rocky Hogback outcropping running through the area, where the aquifer is bent just like the land above it, planners hoped to hit a more porous section of the San Andreas, making pumping easier. They also hoped to hit the aquifer at a natural angle, providing more depth for the well.

With the city’s current wells dropping 22 feet a year, Allgood has said that Gallup could start experiencing water shortages during peak summer hours as soon as 2014 — if nothing more is done. If G-22 succeeds, it could potentially double the city’s water supply for the next 40 years.

Even all that water, Allgood said, would still prove only an “interim” solution to Gallup’s water woes until the pipeline arrives from the San Juan River. But a successful G-22 could make things easier for Gallup when and if it arrives.

Although Gallup would be guaranteed a share of the pipeline’s capacity, if approved by Congress, it has no water rights to fill it with. So while United Drilling boars thousands of feet into the ground, city officials have been hammering out a deal to buy some from the Navajo Nation.

Unfortunately for the city, the Navajo Nation is also challenging its efforts to develop G-22. If two wells are close enough, drawing water from one can take away the supply of the other. If the city starts drawing from G-22, the tribe worries it might take water away from its own wells in the aquifer.

City officials hope the tests it’s conducting on G-22 will help convince the tribe to stop worrying — and lift its challenge before New Mexico’s Office of the State Engineer.

Although the water rights deal they’re working on doesn’t specifically depend on it, said John Leeper, director of the tribe’s Water Management Branch, it does assume that the Navajo Nation’s concerns will get settled.

“The two have to fit together,” he said of the tribe’s worries about G-22 and its pending deal for water rights with Gallup, “but they also have to stand on their own.”

The Navajo Nation, Leeper said, has “significant municipal interests in the San Andreas-Glorietta, so there’s a real interest in managing it in a way that is sustainable.”

Gallup will have to prove G-22’s benign effects on the tribe’s existing wells in the aquifer during upcoming hearings in defense of its state application.