Big Day

Well after almost two years of work in design and securing funding, today was a big step towards getting the Williams Village Raw Water system up and running. The new pump station was delivered today and set in place.

This station, when it comes online later this summer, will feed the irrigation water to the Williams Village complex. This new system will further the use of our Ditch Water rights and remove the usage of domestic water for irrigation at Williams Village. Currently the installation of mainlines and the pond are underway. This system has been designed a lot like the other raw water systems at CU-Boulder with a ditch delivery system, a pond, pump station and new raw water mainline.

The difference with this system compared to the others on main campus is this system has been designed to tie into the existing domestic irrigation systems. The design of the new system was rather challenging. It was tedious trying to make sure to pick up all of the small stand alone domestic systems that are used through-out Williams Village. The irrigation design company that we are using has done a great job trying to find innovative ways to get to all these locations and yet still maintain good hydraulics through the system. It is a very challenging job for sure and they have done great trying to keep everything straight and good to go.

There was a lot of help from many people to get this system funded. The major push to get this system in was to help reduce the amount of domestic water that was used for irrigation. Once this system is in and all the tie-ins have been done we expect a savings of 10-13 million gallons of domestic water. Technically, we will still be using the same amount of water but we will be using untreated ditch water instead of domestic treated water.


Once this station comes online it will be the 5th raw water pump station at CU-Boulder and will convert the last large location of domestically fed irrigation to ditch water.


Ryan