7/30/09
Nearly $25,000 in state funds to clean Española’s Well 1 is being held up because city employees were not properly trained to operate arsenic treatment equipment.
State Environment Department inspectors told the city in May the Department would not pay out the money for a state grant until the city could demonstrate that its operators had been trained and that the system was properly online. The system, built by Cone Construction, was completed in February at a total cost of $700,000.
The state grant would be used to reimburse the city for some of that expense.
“At that time (May), the equipment wasn’t operating a backwash procedure,” said Karen Gallegos, the Department’s director of the Water and Waste Water Infrastructure Development Division. “It wasn’t apparent that any of the operators knew how to do that.”
The backwash procedure relieves pressure on the system and on the well itself caused by the initial treatment process.
In January, the Environmental Protection Agency set new standards for allowable arsenic levels in drinking water, which three of the city’s eight wells, including Well 1, violate.
Since the treatment system could not be considered as functioning without trained operators, the state has been withholding the grant money, which Gallegos said amounts to just under $25,000, until the city notified them that they were prepared to meet a second inspection. The well was shut down for a few days after the inspection.
In fact, the grant contract between the city and the Department mandated that operators be trained to operate the system, stated Chris Vick, of the Department’s Construction Programs Bureau, in an email explaining the state’s decision to city officials, construction subcontractor Cone Construction, and engineering sub-contractor Doug Albin.
“I hope everyone agrees that if a system is inoperable due to a lack of knowledge on how to operate the system, the training was insufficient,” Vick stated in the email.
City Water Director Marvin Martinez said he agrees with Vick’s statement, and that in fact he and his employees were not trained in the procedure cited.
“Obviously the state feels the same as I do,” he said. “We attended training, but it wasn’t complete. There was not a minute of backwash training.”
In lieu of hands-on training in the backwash procedure, city water employees were expected to learn it through a series of instruction manuals, which encompass just under 3,000 pages, and are at times at odds with the actual field conditions, Martinez said.
Martinez and his employees did have incomplete training because they didn’t attend all of it, Acting City Manager Veronica Albin said. Engineering firm Molzen-Corbin, which was involved in the design of the system, and which employs her husband, Doug Albin, attended and video-taped the training, she said. According to the video, the backwash procedure was on the schedule after a lunch break. None of the employees returned, and none expressed any confusion with the training they did receive at the time, she said.
Training costs accounted for $11,000 of Cone’s $700,000 contract.
The well, which is located off of 31-Mile Road, was shut down in May after the state did its first inspection, Martinez said.
City employees have performed the backwash procedure successfully multiple times since the state inspection, Martinez said, so it is likely the state will release the funds and the well will begin working again.