“WE ARE DOWN TO 24 HOURS”

Average daily water usage in Cotulla has passed the million-gallon mark this month and may continue to rise, although supply capabilities are restricted to only two wells and storage capacity will not provide more than a day’s worth in the event of a complete outage.

The city is meeting the end of May and the beginning of a projected summer heatwave with two of its four wells out of commission. Cotulla’s oldest water well, situated beside the La Salle County Courthouse, was taken out of service last year when its shaft casing leaks proved irreparable, and a modern well on Choctaw Street is presently out of service while its pump is replaced.

City Administrator David Wright said late last week that the Choctaw pump has proved problematic for several months since it was affected by an electrical fault at the beginning of the year.

A mechanism at the pump that starts its motor gradually rather than at full speed required replacing, and the facility was put back into service in January. Low water flow, however, became an issue at the well and engineers examined the pump to find it was faulty, Wright said on Friday.

The pump had been installed in 2017.

The city employed engineers from the Solunsky company to examine the equipment and learned that the mechanism had already exceeded its life expectancy by more than a year.

“That’s not very long,” Wright said of the six-year lifespan of a municipal water well pump. “I would expect more. We contacted Don Burger, engineer at Tetra Tech, and he backed that up. The pump was old and needed replacing.”

One of the city’s operational wells will be taken out of service as soon as the Choctaw pump is back online. The well positioned near the county fire station at Martinez Park suffers from a faulty valve that must be replaced within the next month, according to the city. The repair will cost $12,000; replacement parts have been ordered.

The well at the fire station does not have a storage tank above it and feeds water directly into the municipal network.

Cotulla’s two operational wells combine to provide a daily water pumping capacity of two million gallons.

Wright said average daily water use has risen since utilities department head Jimmy Oranday reported his latest figures to the council in April. Tallies for March, he said, showed water usage at more than 800,000 gallons per day.

“We are looking at 1.3 million gallons daily for the summer, and we hope not to exceed 1.9 million,” the city administrator said. “We have recorded usage as high as 2.5 million gallons per day at the height of summer.”

Ground-level and water tower storage capacity for Cotulla is presently measured without including a 500,000-gallon tank beside the county courthouse. The tank had been connected to the adjoining well, but now stands empty.

The tank was installed in the late 1990s.

City councilors have approved pursuing grant and loan funding to reconnect the tank to the city system. The job requires installation of underground piping and valves.

Storage capacity at the beginning of this summer is replenished by the operational wells but has its limits.

“We are down to twenty-four hours, at the most,” Wright said last week. “If we suffer an outage, such as one or both of the remaining wells going out, we have enough water to provide the city for just about a day. That’s it. After that… Well, we just won’t have any water.”

Wright hopes the Choctaw well will be operational before the city’s water demands reach their highest point. Pump installation and subsequent water sampling take days, and may be further delayed if preliminary samples indicate poor water quality.

“That’s part of installing a new pump,” Wright said. “You stand a chance of the first few samples being flawed. We shock the well with chlorine, and we sample it again. Once we know it’s running clear, then we can connect it to the network. We won’t do that until we know it’s clear.”

The city is required to undertake monthly water sampling and submit those results to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Water samples from new pump installations, however, are kept on file at City Hall but do not need submitting to the state agency.

Wright said he and other city utility staff dismiss local negativity about Cotulla’s water quality as due in large part to misinformation spread on social media.

“Historically, Cotulla’s water has been pristine,” he said of the supply that comes from the Carrizo Wilcox Aquifer. “People would come to Cotulla for its water. That hasn’t changed.

“What has changed is what people are being told about the water,” the city administrator said. “It is clean and it is monitored monthly, just as the state requires, and furthermore we are listed as having a superior water supply. The state website even shows it.

“There is nothing to indicate that our water is anything but high quality,”

As per state requirements, the city injects chlorine into its water system at key locations. While the state of Texas does not list a maximum amount of chlorine permissible in a city’s water supply, it does require a minimum number of perts per million, and City Hall records indicate that minimum has been maintained at the furthest reaches of the grid.

“When we inject chlorine, it is aimed at reaching the furthest point,” Wright said. “Yes, that means chlorine levels are higher near the injection site, but that has no bearing on the water quality.”

Whether the aquifer can accommodate Cotulla’s increasing water demands remains in doubt at City Hall.

Water conservation efforts have long been a priority at City Hall, and the municipal government issued a directive last year encouraging residents to practice restraint before mandatory restrictions are required.

Under the city’s drought contingency plan, a drop in the aquifer below 525 feet triggers an ordinance that calls for limits on outdoor watering, car washing and other wasteful use. Subsequent stages of the conservation effort prohibit refilling pools and splash tubs, and a later stage bans all outdoor watering.

At his last report in late April, Oranday indicated the aquifer stood within two feet of the first stage of mandatory water restrictions.

City councilors are scheduled to meet Thursday evening, May 30, to begin talks on the process of renewing the drought contingency plan – which expires this year – and amending the water restriction stages to begin when the aquifer drops to 545 feet below ground.

If the amendment takes effect, Cotulla will only order water use restrictions after the water table has dropped a further 20 feet.

City Hall will contract engineers CDM Smith to help draft the new contingency plan. Communication with the Wintergarden Groundwater Conservation District will likely also play a role in that project, according to Wright.

“Data shows we should be able to withstand it,” the city administrator said of the amendment, adding that he hopes residents will continue practicing sensible water use. “I don’t want to penalize people for something that I can’t control.”

Wright places much of the responsibility for Cotulla’s thirst at the feet of the energy industry whose hydraulic fracturing processes over the Eagle Ford Shale began in earnest after 2008.

“The oilfield is the driving factor in this use of the aquifer,” the city administrator said. “If they were not here, we wouldn’t be seeing this.”