Ruidoso Water Emergency

Hundreds of leaks, millions of gallons of water, wasted.

Like in El Paso, the Village of Ruidoso is in the middle of a water emergency.

“We’ve got water line breaks all over the place,” Justin King, water project manager, said. “We’ve got about 75 people out identifying every one of these breaks and trying to get them shut down.”

Driving along the streets of snow-frosted neighborhoods, emergency crews are looking for what appear to be vacant homes scatted throughout Ruidoso – the majority, owned by people from El Paso.

“You can see the footprints of where we walked around the backside and sides looking for any types of leaks,” Detective Art Nelson, Ruidoso Police Department, said.

As Ruidoso police searched the perimeter of an unoccupied Upper Canyon house, they determined the foundation is in good shape and said, a leak would be obvious to spot.

“You’ll know right off the bat that there’s a busted line because there’s like a small river of water coming out from underneath the house,” Nelson said.

Year-round residents are checking their own pipes. As a man inspected his home, he did not want to talk about his problem, but discovered his house was one of more than 200 in Ruidoso with major leaks.

“There’s something running from the top, running down,” his wife said, as she inspected the foundation.

Other residents said they are taking a proactive approach to prevent significant water loss.

“My pipes are frozen, so I turned my water off to stop any waste,” a Ruidoso native said.

Another woman, visiting from Texas, said the hotel she was staying at turned into a wet mess.

“We didn’t have any leaks but the people at our hotel found many leaks,” she said. “But they’ve gotten it taken care of.”

One leaking home can amount to some 30,000 gallons of water loss, currently costing Ruidoso up to a million gallons a day, Mayor Ray Alborn said. Last week’s arctic blast is believed to have brought on the problem, Alborn said.

“I don’t think the homes here were built for minus 19, minus 20 [degrees],” Alborn said. “I think the key thing is to identify the leaks now, and the people who have homes here, if they are full-time, that they conserve their water.”

Temperatures are expected to drop to single digits again Tuesday night, and now the big conern is what affect that may have on the hundreds of existing water leaks.

“We’re talking about people that could be out of water…all the way to the Upper Canyon if we don’t get this isolated and stopped,” King said.

Worst case scenario, water services would be temporarily cut-off throughout Ruidoso, but right now, Alborn said, he does not see that happening.