Henry Brean
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.
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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 …
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