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Friday, July 30, 2010 | Serving Del Rio and Val Verde County: Since 1929
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Citizen’s request to filter water ignored
Published June 26, 2009
Del Rioan Perry Widener says there are valuable “impurities” in the waters of San Felipe Creek and he has once again asked the city for help in extracting them.
But a city administrator made it clear he believed that the proposed project was more trouble than it was worth and in the end, the council ignored Widener's request.
Widener, the retired owner of an air conditioning business who moved to Del Rio from Cotulla about three years ago, on Tuesday night asked the Del Rio City Council for the part-time assistance of one employee of the city's water treatment plant to help him filter backwash water from the plant. That water is currently collected in a lagoon adjacent to the water treatment plant.
Widener has approached the council on previous occasions and on Tuesday again pitched his plan to filter water collected in the backwash lagoon in an effort to extract miniscule particles of precious metals.
“. . . Any and all waters. . . in the United States have valuable minerals in them, including gold, silver, platinum, uranium, palladium, any number of those things that are of value,” Widener told the council.
When asked by Councilman Mike Wrob for an estimate of the value of the material he expects to collect from the water, Widener replied his estimates are “.6 parts per million for gold and silver, palladium and some other things, very low values.”
Widener also pointed out these “impurities” are “very difficult to collect in a standard water stream.”
“But once you have processed the water and have a high concentration of those minerals, it's worth investigating to see what minerals are there,” he said.
Widener insisted the plan will cost the city nothing but the time of a water plant employee.
He told the council that if “the water is confirmed to have an extractable amount of matter,” then it may proceed by purchasing filtration equipment from Widener at the cost of $10,000.
If an “extractable amount of matter” is found, Widener also asked for a finder's fee equal to 5 percent of the proceeds from the heavy metal for one year and a promise by the city to use those proceeds “to improve the life of the citizens of Del Rio, tennis courts, park improvements and animal rescue center.”
Wrob asked Mitch Lomas, supervisor of the city's water treatment plant, for his thoughts on Widener's plan.
Lomas presented the council with the city's own analysis of water and sludge from the backwash lagoon.
Lomas told the council the analysis found amounts of gold and silver “very, very low; almost undetectable.”
Lomas also pointed out that the city's water treatment plant uses filters five times smaller than those proposed by Widener.
“Our filter is extracting these very, very small quantities, and it is very unlikely that Mr. Widener's filters are going to produce better numbers than what we see in this report,” Lomas told the council.
Lomas also said that it is unlikely the water plant will be able to supply the 30 days of uninterrupted water flow Widener says he will need for his extraction project, and noted that summer is the water treatment plant's busiest season.
After hearing both presentations, Del Rio Mayor Efrain Valdez said, “I just don't see the need for this.”
Councilwoman Pat Cole agreed.
“I don't see that it serves any purpose at this time,” she said.
The council took no action, and moved on to its next agenda item.
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