Power line project can't soar past Willcox water woes
A helicopter with a worker dangling beneath it buzzed among a row of newly built transmission towers north of Willcox last Sunday, as construction continued on a multi-billion-dollar wind-energy power line through Southern Arizona.
But it was another aspect of the SunZia project that had Willcox officials worried earlier this year.
In May, water stopped flowing from one of the two municipal wells used to supply more than 1,500 residents of the farming and ranching community about 85 miles east of Tucson.
A city consultant soon traced the problem to pumping from a nearby commercial well that was supplying water for the construction of the power line.
At one time, city officials estimated that as many as 30 5,000-gallon trucks were being filled each day from the commercial well, an amount of water equal to about one-third of the total daily use by municipal customers in Willcox.
Several residential wells in the vicinity of the commercial well also went dry at around the same time, city officials said.
Willcox eventually had to shut down its well so the pump could be lowered to reach the declining groundwater level.
Well No. 1 remained offline for almost a month, leaving the city with only one working well and not enough system capacity to meet its peak summer demand from previous years.
Luckily, water use stayed low enough to avoid a potential crisis, according to Deputy City Manager Michael Resare.
He said both of Willcox's municipal wells have since been refurbished and their pumps lowered significantly to a depth of more than 500 feet, with some of the work paid for by SunZia.
A separate $2 million grant, awarded to the city in September by the state's Water Infrastructure Finance Authority , will pay for additional improvements to the city's water system, Resare said.
For a while there, though, it looked like Willcox might end up filing a lawsuit against the power-line project and its parent company, San Francisco-based renewables giant Pattern Energy.
"We were definitely headed that way, but we were able to work out a settlement," Resare said.
Under the deal approved by the Willcox City Council on Aug. 15, SunZia denied any wrongdoing but agreed to pay the city $150,000 to help cover the cost of its well work and back the city's application for state grant assistance.
"SunZia Transmission recognizes the critical importance of water to Willcox and is committed to supporting communities that are part of the project," said Pattern spokesman Matt Dallas in a written statement on Thursday. "SunZia is using a relatively small quantity of water — far less than a small farm might use in the same period — to temporarily control dust and for some construction efforts. These activities are nearing completion, and water use will reduce significantly over the coming months."
Once the transmission project is finished, SunZia Southwest will stretch 550 miles from central New Mexico to Pinal County to deliver power to the grid from a 3,500-megawatt wind energy project that Pattern is also building.
According to the company, the two projects, totaling more than $8 billion, represent the largest renewable energy investment in U.S. history. The wind farm will be the largest in the Western Hemisphere, stretching across three New Mexico counties and producing enough power to supply more than 3 million people.
Dallas said construction work on both projects is on schedule and "nearly 50% complete."
The Arizona leg of the transmission line — a 200-mile string of about 780 towers, some as tall as 195 feet — is on track to be finished by the middle of next year, he said.
Well worries
Willcox's first water scare led to a second one later in the summer.
On Aug. 3, the city was forced to issue an emergency water conservation alert to customers, after the electrical panel failed on one of its wells while the other well was already offline for maintenance and upgrades. That left the city with no way to refill its main storage tank at the base of Willcox's "W" Mountain.
Thankfully, Resare said, the water in the tank lasted just long enough for the repairs to be made. The crisis was over in less than 24 hours.
But the episode highlights just how fragile water supplies can be in the Willcox area , where dozens of wells have run dry in recent decades amid heavy agricultural pumping across the closed groundwater basin.
Over-pumping of the aquifer has caused the land to subside by more than 11 feet in some areas, and state data shows the problem is accelerating. More than 50 miles of fissures have been mapped so far, including some that have damaged roads and other property.
The Arizona Department of Water Resources officially stepped in on Oct. 23, announcing an immediate moratorium on new agricultural development in the Willcox Basin until state regulators can decide whether to designate the 1,911-square-mile watershed as an Active Management Area . Such a designation could lead to new and escalating limits on groundwater pumping in parts of Cochise and Graham counties, particularly by farms, which are the basin's biggest industry and heaviest water user by far.
Some are welcoming the state's intervention, calling it long overdue. Others are criticizing it because they say the rules governing Active Management Areas are too inflexible and could prevent local water conservation efforts.
Resare didn't weigh in on all of that, but he did say that the city is poised to become part of the solution to the basin's water woes, at least for some residents.
Thanks to the $2 million in state WIFA grant money it just got, Willcox can now afford to make further upgrades to its existing water system and drill a brand new well, he said. That should allow the city to eventually expand its service area to reach other Cochise County residents whose private wells are running dry.
"We see the problem. We just need the piping so we can serve those people," Resare said.
Appeal underway
Elsewhere, meanwhile, the SunZia transmission project still faces a legal fight from rural residents, Native American tribes and conservation groups over the decision to route the power line through the San Pedro River Valley north of Benson.
On Monday, attorneys for the Tohono O'odham Nation, the San Carlos Apache Tribe, Archaeology Southwest and the Center for Biological Diversity filed their latest brief in the case, now with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
They are challenging an earlier federal district court ruling that dismissed their claims on the grounds that they waited far too long to make them.
The two Arizona tribes and the conservationists backing them sued the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in January in hopes of stopping work on the power line so experts could identify and inventory culturally significant sites along its path across the eastern slope of the Rincon Mountains.
"The whole valley is a cultural landscape," said Bill Doelle, president emeritus and senior advisor for Archaeology Southwest .
Doelle said the San Pedro River channel and the hills surrounding it are sown with evidence of human habitation spanning more than 12,000 years. Archaeologists have found the remains of settlements, early irrigated croplands and even ball courts, charting the movement and evolution of indigenous cultures across millennia.
"There are a couple of village sites that will have SunZia towers going right through them," said Alex Binford-Walsh, who lives in the Cascabel area and serves as a San Pedro community steward for Archaeology Southwest.
During a September aerial tour of the valley in an airplane operated by the nonprofit group EcoFlight, Binford-Walsh pointed out one such site among the long line of pads and transmission towers now under construction.
So many other riparian areas across Southern Arizona have already been developed or destroyed, erasing evidence of the ancient cultures that once lived there, he said. This is one of the few unspoiled places left, but time is running out to save it. "We still have a lot to learn, and the San Pedro Valley is our best chance of learning it," Binford-Walsh said.
Joining him on the Sept. 25 flight was Samuel Fayuant, who works as a cultural affairs specialist for the Tohono O'odham Nation.
He said government officials have handled the SunZia project in a way that has become all too familiar to Native Americans: with no substantial effort to seek out tribal expertise and little appetite to hear it when it's offered.
"They're going to do what they're going to do," Fayuant said. "It seems like we have very little voice in the matter."
Lofty endeavor
According to SunZia officials, the power line work outside of Willcox last weekend was unusual — and not just because it involved a guy swinging from a helicopter.
Dallas said construction crews don't normally work on Sundays, but they were out there that day to take advantage of favorable flying conditions.
The dangerous, highly skilled work required the pilot to hover close enough to each transmission tower so his dangling lineman could attach a giant pulley that eventually will be used to string power lines between the structures.
Every few minutes, the helicopter would return to a staging area just north of Apple Annie's You-Pick Orchard and carefully lower its lineman to the ground so he could hook onto the next pulley. Then the helicopter would race off again with the lineman and the pulley in tow.
And as soon as they were gone, a worker on the ground would grab the hose from a nearby tanker truck and spray the staging area with water to keep the dust down.
Contact reporter Henry Brean at . On Twitter:
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