The Falcon Area Water Authority (FAWA) is a new entity that plans to take water from High Forest Ranch, Bar-X Ranch and McCune Ranch (now known as Winsome) and pipe it down to supply Sterling Ranch, the Ranch and TimberRidge, and eventually several Falcon area water districts (Meridian, Woodmen Hills, Falcon Highlands and others.) The attached maps show the proposed well locations and pipeline systems. The package says that the Falcon area water districts are needing more water (we already knew that.) The project entails 27 well sites (High Forest - 7, Bar-X - 16, McCune - 4) with two wells per site potential. The wells will not use the Dawson aquifer. Since we don't know the amount of water that moves up and down between the four aquifers, draining the lower two or three aquifers might well affect the Dawson as well. There is not a clear, impermeable boundary between the aquifers. The wells will connect to a central 24-inch waterline that will go east on Hodgen to Meridian and then south to the storage tank and treatment facility for Sterling Ranch on Arroya.
The pipeline will cost about $12 million and each set of wells will cost $3 million so the cost is really high. They propose to drill the first wells in 2022 or 2023. They have identified water rights for sale on several other ranches in Black Forest so we can expect that maybe some other ranches might sell their water rights. Potential plans for SDS water from the city are possible but the application states that even if they had city water they might not have a high priority for water supplies in a severe drought so they want these non-renewable supplies from our Denver basin. The application states that there are few, if any, other sources of available water in the county sufficient to meet the needs of the Falcon area water providers. As we have always said, "Paper water does not always equal wet water." The decreed water rights given to the FAWA aren't necessarily the amount of water that they are able to economically extract. Comments are closed.
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February 2022
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