By Jerry Needham
San Antonio Express-News
Copyright 2007 San Antonio Express-News
All Rights Reserved
HELOTES, Texas — As a huge mulch pile continues to smolder near Helotes, local water officials worry that a plan to tackle the blaze anew on Thursday could again send pollutants coursing through the Edwards Aquifer, possibly threatening public supply wells.
The revised plan, worked out since firefighting operations were shut down on Jan. 18 after two wells became contaminated, calls for drenching equipment and its operators with up to 10.5 million gallons of water during up to five weeks of maneuvers. An undetermined amount of water would be used to douse burning material that would be pulled into clay-lined pits being constructed around the pile.
The two wells, about three-fourths of a mile from the pile, were contaminated with smoky ash and soot a week after the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality seized control of the mound that’s been burning since Dec. 26 and sent in a contractor who wet the pile with 4.1 million gallons of water in its initial efforts to extinguish the blaze.
The plan to put up to twice as much more water on the pile has officials with the Edwards Aquifer Authority and the San Antonio Water System concerned.
“There’s no question that if you put much water on the fire, it’s going to get into the aquifer,” said EAA General Manager Robert Potts, whose agency regulates the resource that supplies drinking water for 1.5 million people in the region.
“We would prefer that they not fight the fire, because we think the effects of the risks to the aquifer are worse than the effects of living with the smoke,” he said. “I realize that’s easier for me to say since I don’t live next to it, but still, in thinking about the whole region, if they need to fight the fire, we would prefer that they get some equipment in there so they can fight it with no or very minimal water.”
But TCEQ officials say letting the fire burn itself out is not an option.
“The fire needs to be put out,” wrote Kelly Cook, Texas homeland security director and commander of the TCEQ emergency force sent to handle the fire, in response to questions Friday. “We have a true problem with the air pollution and only the potential of an impact for water pollution.”
Cook said the two continuous air quality monitors that TCEQ placed near the fire site “have not measured levels above the 24-hour standard” for tiny particles, but some of the measurements in the area show public exposures have been higher than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s advisory levels for such particles.
Bexar County has been paying to house dozens of people who have provided doctor’s statements that remaining in their homes near the smoke would be harmful to their health.
But the state environmental agency’s initial rush to quench the fire and quell the smoke complaints has been slowed and complicated by the huge pile’s location: an area where rainfall runoff and stream flows readily enter the ground to refill the aquifer.
Steve Clouse, vice president of production and treatment operations for SAWS, raised the specter of potential costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars if contamination reaches major SAWS pumping stations.
“Probably one of our biggest concerns is that there’s no contingency plan” if wells begin again to be affected by the firefighting water, Clouse told the utility board’s Planning and Operations Committee on Thursday.
He said SAWS has six pumping stations within 8 miles south and southeast of the fire — the closest a little over 5 miles south of the fire.
“The aquifer’s flow in that area is generally from northwest to southeast,” Clouse said. “Our systems are potentially in line with where that flow may go.”
Directly southeast and 6 miles away is the Wurzbach Pump Station, whose wells can pump up to 117 million gallons a day.
“We’re estimating that about 100,000 people could be impacted if the Wurzbach Pump Station became unusable,” Clouse told the committee.
He said it would be expensive to quickly install a system to treat the polluted water.
“It doesn’t take long to figure out that this would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially, if that plume should reach some of our public wells,” Clouse said.
And once the dirty water sinks below the mulch pile, it’s almost a guess where it might show up in the fractured and faulted aquifer, he said, noting that the water bypassed several wells to get to the two it did affect last month.
And with the SAWS pumping stations drawing millions of gallons of water daily, any polluted water could slowly leak into a conduit that could shuttle it toward the city’s wells over an extended period of time, he said.
“The fact is, nobody really knows if this will be seen elsewhere before it shows up at a SAWS well,” Clouse told the committee.
He said water contaminated by the residue isn’t likely to be a health threat, but customers wouldn’t want to use it.
“The probability of that water moving that distance and violating the drinking water standards is unlikely,” Clouse said. “But if you could smell the samples that we’ve seen, I can assure you that nobody is going to drink that water and we’re going to have to answer a million phone calls.”
The water samples from the contaminated wells were so nasty looking and smoky smelling that no one would think of using it for any household purpose, he said.
Both the EAA and SAWS have urged the state environmental agency from the beginning and in letters to the highest levels to go slow on the firefighting efforts because of concerns about the aquifer.
The rapid pace of activities prompted SAWS President David Chardavoyne to fax a letter on Jan. 11 — two days before firefighting efforts started — to TCEQ Chairwoman Kathleen Hartnett White expressing concerns about the potential for aquifer contamination.
“In dealing with this mulch fire, the system’s primary concern is that it be done in a responsible fashion to avoid or diminish aquifer contamination and to avoid a potentially more serious environmental hazard,” Chardavoyne wrote.
Still concerned about the revised plan, SAWS on Jan. 26 contracted with the international firefighting crew of Boots and Coots in Houston to observe conditions and provide recommendations for putting out the fire with minimal water use, Clouse said.
Boots and Coots suggested a huge dragline to pull material to the clay-lined pit where it could be extinguished and all the water captured, he said. But an available dragline has not been located, and TCEQ officials say they’ll proceed with the adopted plan.
“We want to see the fire out, but our primary concern is that all due concern be given to protection of the Edwards Aquifer,” Clouse told the committee. “I want to assure the board that we’ve communicated that concern for potential impacts with the plan to TCEQ and that TCEQ understands the number of people who could be impacted.”
Cook, the homeland security coordinator, said firefighting activities will be halted if impacts to wells are seen and that the situation would be reassessed to determine the appropriate course.