To so many around the west sustainable water supplies are the most important issue going.

During and shortly after Colorado's drought earlier this century, the city of Aurora started looking for long-term solutions to what was almost a crisis in supply. Normally the notion of reusing wastewater does not sit well with customers of water systems. Sometimes called, "Toilet to tap," reuse evokes images of consuming sewage. However thanks to water engineering and science reused water can be an important part of the supply puzzle.

Aurora's reuse project, Prairie Waters, is intended to leverage Colorado water law which allows the use of out of basin water to extinction. Aurora gets a good deal of their water from the Colorado River Basin and the Arkansas River Basin. Reusing this out of basin water represents a new supply without the attendant problems of procuring new water rights from agriculture and a change of use decree from water court.

The project consists of natural purification basins in the alluvial aquifer along the South Platte, a new pipeline and treatment facility near Aurora Reservoir. Water will be pumped from the alluvial aquifer into the recharge basins where it recharges the groundwater. They've built an impermeable barrier around an area of the aquifer to keep water in place. Once the water seeps into the aquifer, where it undergoes natural filtering, it will then be pumped 34 miles from near Brighton to the treatment facility at Aurora Reservoir, to be treated to drinking water standards and then added to the normal distribution system.

Former Director of Aurora Utilities, Peter Binney, called the project the "Most drought-hardened project in the state," since it targets water that is currently flowing down the South Platte unused.

The project avoids the environmental pitfalls that some supply projects face. New reservoirs are difficult to permit and they sometimes spend years (or decades) on the drawing board before coming on line. All major Colorado rivers are over-appropriated.

Permanent water rights are getting more expensive. Since water shares usually come from agriculture, transfers are facing greater scrutiny and opposition in rural areas. Aurora is still viewed with skepticism and rancor in the Arkansas Valley since the city helped cause the dry up of thousands of acres of farmland in Crowley County during the 80's and 90's. At present the Bureau of Reclamation is in court defending their long-term contract with Aurora that allows the city to store water in Lake Pueblo and exchange it upstream on the Arkansas so that it can be pumped over the divide to South Park and into the city's collection system.

Prairie Waters will help the city meet the demands of a growing population, avoid some legal entanglements and help improve Aurora's image in the Arkansas Valley. It's a rare win-win for a water utility, providing that the city can manage their citizen's views of reuse, of course.

I follow Colorado water issues at Coyote Gulch. Here's the link to the Google index of Coyote Gulch for Prairie Waters. Please send story ideas and links to jworr [AT] operamail [DOT] com.