Town’s water supply delivery system eyed for future repair

Addressing the problem of thousands of gallons of missing water
    
Picture a hose feeding water into a metal bucket with some holes in the bottom of that bucket. The container can get full but it won’t stay that way unless the water in the hose is constant.

The same can be said for the town of Crested Butte. The municipal water system is more than a bit leaky and thousands of gallons of water go missing from the system every day. The town staff is working on trying to fix the problem but they admit it is a constant battle.
“Ideally, in most town water systems, having less than a 10 percent water loss is considered acceptable,” explained Crested Butte water system supervisor David Jelinek. “While we don’t have specific figures for the amount lost in Crested Butte, we are in the process of collecting that data and we know it is significantly more than 10 percent.”
Water losses are measured from the water that is treated minus the water that is metered. However, in Crested Butte, not everything is even metered. When the fire department releases water from hydrants to fill the trucks or test the system, that water isn’t measured. Nor is the water used in the town cemetery, for example. The town simply has not prioritized 100 percent metering in the past.
“We are just starting to focus on compiling the water loss data,” Jelinek reported. “We don’t know exact numbers but we know it is a lot. We are working to compile good, valid data and figure out how to remedy the situation. You have to remember we have a very short season in the summer to work on it.”
Jelinek and new Crested Butte public works director Rodney Due have prioritized the leakage situation. “We had a professional leak survey done last week and while we don’t have solid numbers, we feel that the primary leaks are in the service lines between the town’s water main and the houses,” said Jelinek.
The Crested Butte water system starts with Coal Creek, where water is diverted to fill up a pond above the water treatment plant. The water then flows to the treatment plant and into a couple of 25,000-gallon clear wells. The water is then stored primarily in a 500,000-gallon underground storage reservoir, where gravity takes over and feeds the distribution system into the taps of houses and businesses all over town.
If Coal Creek is the hose and the water treatment plant and reservoir the bucket, then the distribution system is the holes in the Crested Butte bucket.
And there are a lot of holes in the system.
July and August are the highest water-use months in Crested Butte. Right now, approximately 725,000 gallons per day are put through the system. Even at a modest 10 percent leakage rate, that is more than 72,000 gallons of missing water a day, and that is on the extreme low end of any estimate.
The water consumption number rises in mid-summer to about 800,000 gallons a day. “We don’t even have enough storage for one day and that is another priority,” Jelinek said.
As town manager Susan Parker said, “People wonder why we have water regulations and limits. It’s because if they want water to come out of the tap when they take a shower, they can’t also water their lawns all day long. The town just doesn’t have that much storage.”
The town will ticket people watering their lawns outside of regulated times. In fact the town’s community service officer, Wes Brewer, has issued 13 warnings and one ticket so far this summer.
“We’d rather give a warning but we will ticket if people are flagrant about watering outside the regulations,” Brewer explained. “This is the time of year a lot of second-home owners come back and aren’t familiar with the system. July is a big month for warnings.”
Tickets carry a $25 fine. Brewer said the restrictions are in effect 12 months a year. Watering is allowed only from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. or 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. on certain days of the week, depending on the property address.
In old mining towns, Jelinek admits, the systems can be difficult to deal with because pipes are old and the system is usually put together piecemeal. But he wants to tighten things up and get the water leakage down to that 10 percent goal.
“This is the summer we are collecting the hard data and next summer there will likely be more intense work. But the fact of the matter is that leaks in any system are constant,” he said. “It will never go away. You do what you can and prioritize the big leaks.”