EBTAG Annual Workshop and Field Trip
May 20-21, 2013

¹N.M. Environment Department, Drinking Water Bureau, 1190 St. Francis Drive, Santa Fe, NM, 87502, dennis.mcquillan@state.nm.us

²New Mexico Bureau of Geology

³New Mexico Department of Health

⁴New Mexico Environment Department

Water users in New Mexico are facing extraordinary and unprecedented challenges in protecting the quality and sustainability of their water sources. These challenges arise from the combined effects of natural and anthropogenic contamination, groundwater depletion and severe drought. The information needed to protect existing water sources, to locate and develop new water sources, and to assess aquifer vulnerability in permitting or spill abatement situations is widely scattered and has not been assembled in a single, easily accessible, location. U.S. Congress provided for source water protection in the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments and required that the states use, “all reasonably available hydrogeologic information on the sources of the supply of drinking water in the state and the water flow, recharge, and discharge…” 

The New Mexico Environment Department, the New Mexico Bureau of Geology, and the New Mexico Department of Health are collaborating to produce an Internet-based Atlas that will provide access to the tremendous amount of hydrogeologic information in the state. The Atlas will build on existing resources within the collaborating organizations, and will produce the following online tools:

• bibliography for hydrogeologic information;
• groundwater geochemistry archive; and
• geographic information system (GIS) that contains data layers showing groundwater geochemistry, anthropogenic and natural sources of contamination, aquifer vulnerability, and areas of groundwater depletion and subsidence.