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October 8, 2003: At a meeting of the GVCCC Environmental Committee Friday, PD's Wood said that the mine and the water company have identified "two long-term solutions" to the water problem. One, Wood said, is for PD to find higher quality water in its own wells and make it available to Community Water to put into service. The other option is for PD to install a new well for Community Water outside the impacted area, Wood said. Both options could be a long time coming, however, as water regulation in Arizona is typically a long and Byzantine process. "We are pursuing this with all due speed," Wood said Friday. "But there is a lot of regulation involved; this will take us several months to work through." Meantime, PD and Community Water are working on a quicker, short-term option that could have cleaner drinking water on the west side within the month, Wood said. May 14, 2004: "In the short-term we want to pump water from one of our existing well fields (and take the offending Community Water wells out of commission); that would greatly reduce the level of sulfates," said Bruce Richardson, a Phelps Dodge Corp. spokesman. "We are hoping that we can get that done as soon as possible, and it is a priority to us, but it is not a completely simple situation." Richardson said that state and county water regulations contribute greatly to the uncertainty surrounding a possible solution to the issue. As for a long-term solution, Richardson said that Phelps Dodge and Community Water are working on it but have yet to come up with one. December 1, 2004 But Phelps Dodge's Vaughn said that a short-term, temporary solution is still in the works. He said
that Phelps Dodge is still working on a plan to connect one of the wells
with low sulfate levels at the mine's Esperanza Well Field to the Community
Water system by the first quarter of 2005. Vaughn said that the mine will file for permits within the next few weeks that will allow them to hook their well into Community Water's system. But the only long-term permanent solution to the problem is to construct a new well outside of the reach of the sulfate plume, he said. And it
appears that all parties agree that it will be another year until that
happens.
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