Nichols Reservoir in the SF Watershed sits at about 43 percent capacity.
Santa Fe and outlying areas got a good dousing of rain this month, but those cloudbursts didn't fall equally in the city's watershed.
Alex Puglisi, interim source and supply manager for the city, says the water levels in two reservoirs are actually very low at present—and he's ok with it.
"The other night when we got 1.75 inches in town, we got about .38 inches in the watershed," he says, "So basically we are not seeing these large events like we saw last year—with one or two events with 2 inches— that really filled up the reservoirs. This year that is not happening."
Nichols Reservoir is only about 43 percent full, he says, and its larger sibling, the McClure Reservoir, is at about 5 percent of capacity.
City of Santa Fe
Those numbers don't mean the city is in dire straits with respect to water supply, however. They're low mostly because officials are in the process of draining the bigger lake for reconstruction of an aging outflow control tower.
In the spring, Nichols was completely drained so the same reconstruction could take place there. Since that work wrapped up in the early summer, the city has been releasing water down the river for the "Living River" ordinance and for deliveries to acequias for irrigation. Plus, because they know they'll soon move water down from McClure, the city has been treating and delivering water from Nichols to municipal taps as well.
"Part of the reason for that is that we've been treating throughout the summer is because if we do have a normal winter, we want to be able to at least capture that much snowmelt in Nichols," Puglisi says. "We are hearing it's going to be a normal or above normal snowpack year and McClure won't be done by the time we get to snowmelt season."
The tower on McClure really needs the repairs, he says, noting that valves that should already be releasing water downstream are stuck closed, and that kind of inoperability is dangerous. The two reservoir projects together have a pricetag that exceeds $7 million.
The city also gets water from the Rio Grande through the Buckman Direct Diversion and from two groundwater well fields.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story gave the wrong percentages for reservoir levels.
