Supporting Arizona’s water infrastructure is vital to protect our water supplies and way of life. To gain a fresh perspective on the different types of water-related infrastructure we rely on to support communities and ecosystems, Audubon Southwest organized a tour in late August in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona.
The tour emphasized the need to invest in all of our water infrastructure—both built or “hard” infrastructure as well as “natural” infrastructure. Hard infrastructure moves water in pipes, storage tanks, canals, and reservoirs. Natural infrastructure includes forests, rivers, streams, meadows, and watersheds.
Throughout the Colorado River Basin, landscapes and watersheds are our original, natural infrastructure. It performs complementary functions to hard infrastructure, capturing, storing, filtering, and regulating the flow of water before reaching the built infrastructure that delivers water to taps, farms, and communities.
To see the impact these water infrastructure projects have on the ground and how communities are dealing with their water challenges to improve their water outlook, we went into the field.
Rural Water Infrastructure
Water infrastructure encompasses various components—pipes, storage tanks, booster pumps to maintain pressure, water meters to measure use—to name a few. It takes a lot to successfully manage a community’s water system and deliver safe, reliable water to customers.
Both small, rural water providers and larger, metropolitan providers have immense responsibilities and requirements to meet when it comes to water, but the resources available and challenges each faces can differ greatly.
To better understand those challenges, our first tour stop was in Heber, Arizona, where we got a crash course in rural water utility management. Heber Domestic Water Improvement District is in the design phase after receiving nearly $4 million from the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority’s (WIFA) Water Supply Development Revolving Fund to interconnect two systems and install an additional water storage tank to add critically needed redundancy. Just three days before our visit, the original 50-year-old tank (the one that was scheduled to be replaced) collapsed, draining 300,000 gallons of water in less than two minutes. The Heber Domestic Water Improvement District’s operator was quick to act and ran a hose to another tank to restore service. This emergency was exactly why the project was originally slated: redundancy provides backup to a system to ensure water delivery during the unexpected and to replace vital infrastructure, hopefully before it’s too late.
Next, we visited Pinedale Estates and got a peek at their community water system as it was being upgraded. Poor water quality from naturally occurring elements plagued the community, and storage tanks were failing. After piecemealing for years, Pinedale Estates neighbors came together with help from Mogollon Water Management to secure vital funding in the form of loans and grants from WIFA and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. The community will soon have new groundwater wells running with improved drinking water quality and important redundancy in the water system. For the first time, they will have fire hydrants to protect their community.
Natural Water Infrastructure and Watershed Health
The health of our watersheds (the land areas that capture rain and snowmelt and drain into rivers, lakes, and streams) is critical to our water supplies.
Our final stop on the tour took us into the headwaters of the Salt River to visit the picturesque Thompson-Burro Meadow, which sits in the shadow of Mount Baldy.
Here, we heard from Trout Unlimited who is working with the U.S. Forest Service to restore the once-degraded meadow that was impacted by the Wallow Fire in 2011. By installing more than 200 woody “log jam” structures into the streams of the meadow, the project allows the landscape to act as a sponge, slowing the water’s flow, raising groundwater levels, connecting the river with its floodplain, and reestablishing native riverside plants like willows. This work helps sustain the Black River, which flows into the Salt River and is delivered to the Phoenix area via the Salt River Project.
Scaling up these types of watershed health projects and restoring forests is crucial to sustaining our water supplies and restoring habitat for wildlife.
Throughout the tour, it was amazing to see the on-the-ground impact that these vital investments in water projects can have. It is no surprise that recent polling found nearly all Arizona voters believe it is important for federal and state officials to improve water security in the Colorado River Basin. In order to do that, we must continue to invest from a variety of sources (including local, state, federal, philanthropic, and corporate funding) to improve Arizona’s overall water outlook—from the hard water infrastructure projects to natural water infrastructure projects.
