By SAVANNAH ELLER

and CLEO WESTIN

The Gazette

WALSENBURG — Walsenburg Fire Chief Roy Britt was tired Thursday afternoon, with a few more hours to go lugging pallets of donated water at a distribution location in the city’s community center.

Since the beginning of a disaster declaration created by a water main break on March 13, Britt has been working long hours distributing drinking water to residents who came by car and on foot.

Mayor Gary Vezzani said the scale of the crisis was the product of uniquely bad circumstances.

“If we had found that right away, this would have never happened; nobody would have ever known,” he said.

As it is now, the Walsenburg native said he had never seen anything like this before in his 71 years living in the city. The southern Colorado town off of Interstate 25 has about 3,000 residents and is the county seat of Huerfano County.

A water main break has shut off water access to residents and prompted a boil advisory for the city for almost a week. The Huerfano County Board of Commissioners approved a major disaster declaration in response.

The American Red Cross of Southern Colorado mobilized to provide thousands of water bottles to the community, which it said in a statement had “urgent humanitarian needs.”

After fixing a smaller leak on March 13, officials believed the major leak may have been pouring into one of the city’s abandoned coal mine shafts. Crews were called in from Denver Water early Sunday morning to attempt to locate the leak with sonar equipment, but were unsuccessful.

However, the real answer was hidden in the Cucharas River, which supplies water to the town.

Crews located the leak on Monday after noticing river levels were unusually high by Interstate 25 and low by the city, Vezzani said. The amount of concrete above the leak forced city officials to call in a large excavator that aided in repairs Wednesday evening.

After finding the major leak, the town’s utilities department is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Technician Evan Gonzales and a team were excavating Thursday afternoon to replace a water valve, one of several finishing touches on repairs to the leaking line.

Gonzales described the problem in essence as pretty simple.

“Water main breaks happen all the time,” he said.

Vezzani expected water service would be restored to all of Walsenburg later on Thursday. The boil order was still in effect for the city, and Vezzani estimated it would expire over the weekend.

Correctional facility woes

The broken water main is the latest in a long line of disappointments for the city related to what was once its biggest economic driver: the Huerfano County Correctional Facility. The water line that leaked was originally constructed to supply the facility, which closed in 2010.

Walsenburg is still buried in debt from the loans it took to supply water and power the facility that was once its biggest economic driver.

“We need something to get out from underneath this debt,” Vezzani said.

The town raised its water rates by about $30 per customer in 2024 to cover its infrastructure loans, which amount to more than $1 million in payments each year.

The privately owned prison still has its utilities paid for, and the building has been maintained since its closure, Vezzani said.

The situation is part of a general sense of disappointment in the town’s prospects among some.

Joel Shults, a former chief of police, sat reading a newspaper in Serendipity Coffee House Thursday morning. The shop could not serve ice in drinks on an unseasonably warm day because of the boil order.

“I think the prison has been an example of unkept promises,” he said.

Shults also pointed to Walsenburg’s shuttered water park, which has been closed since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gov. Jared Polis signaled to lawmakers a willingness to expand the prison system to address overcrowding, according to previous Gazette reporting. The Office of State Planning and Budgeting suggested purchasing the Huerfano County Correctional Facility to accomplish that.

No one from the governor’s office or any other state official has contacted the city of Walsenburg about the potential of purchasing the property or reopening the facility, Vezzani said.

Deferred maintenance

Even before the water crisis, many Walsenburg residents said they were hesitant about drinking tap water in the city. Vezzani said he understood concerns, but felt that the experience of hard water was the “nature of the Cucharas (River).”

Shults said part of the issue was distrust in the city’s leadership and aging infrastructure, however.

“The confidence in the government is about as high as it is in the water quality,” he said.

The boil water order is not the first warning Walsenburg has gotten about its drinking water this year.

In January and again in February, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment required the city to send residents a notice about a “significant deficiency” in its drinking water supply.

The notice asserted that the town had not installed a device that prevents backflow and potential contamination. The problem was first identified in 2020, but the city told residents that the fix was estimated for August of this year.

Vezzani said the town was not in a financial position to accept matching grants. He said the town was functioning with deferred maintenance. At the same time, the population of the town has been declining.

“We’re going backwards, if we’re being honest,” he said.