By Lee Ross
The Mountain View Telegraph via The Albuquerque Journal
TORREON, N.M. — Torreon is ahead of the curve when it comes to water conservation.
By building a rooftop water harvesting system at the Torreon fire station, three local soil and water conservation districts have helped to unburden the local water system, according to Art Swenka, a volunteer at the fire station.
The system was paid for by the Edgewood, East Torrance, and Claunch-Pinto conservation districts, which each pitched in a third of the $21,000 it took to build the system.
And the system itself is pretty simple. The water from half of the fire station’s roof area is collected using a series of pipes are attached along the rain gutter. Those pipes lead to a black, plastic, 10,000 gallon tank.
When that tank fills up, there is a pump that pushes water to the fire station’s main tank, a roughly 20,000 gallon metal tank and there’s a pipe for any excess water, once those two tanks are filled, that goes to a line of trees.
“It doesn’t take much to harvest water,” Swenka said.
The difference, though, is that those tanks are kept full most of the time, though. In an area that isn’t really known for lots of rainfall, it only took a 20 by 80-foot rooftop to supply more water than the fire department really needs, Swenka said.
On the other hand, the volunteer fire department only gets a handful of calls each week. What was important about this project, though, was conserving drinking water for residents.
Torreon has its own water system, including hydrants, that is supported by residents. What that means, Swenka explained, is that the residents were footing the bill to purify and pump water that would end up being shot onto a fire and seep back into the ground.
Not only that, but the fire department was using up some of the residents’ water rights, he said.
“It just didn’t seem fair,” he said.
Even though the harvested water isn’t filtered and shouldn’t be used for drinking, the water doesn’t grow algae or develop other problems in the tanks. And the fire station is still hooked into the water system, but now the only water the station uses is inside the building, basically for firefighters to wash their hands or rinse out a cup.
Although the situation in Torreon may be somewhat unique, Swenka added that there are a lot of rooftops over fire stations in Albuquerque, in the East Mountains and all over the Estancia Valley.
“To think that you’re using good drinking water to shoot on a fire doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” he said.
Copyright 2010 Albuquerque Journal