Saving Manitou from an ocean of trouble

MANITOU SPRINGS • Sally Thurston says she saved Manitou Springs.

It's a bold claim, coming from a mild-mannered 60-year-old bed-and-breakfast owner, and she smiles when she says it.

But it might be true.

"I did," said Thurston, owner of the Blue Skies Inn on Manitou Avenue. "That is my contention, that I saved Manitou."

An old well on her land was leaking and in danger of bursting. It was no ordinary well, but a 635-foot straw accidentally punched into the city's mineral springs 30 years ago, when a 80-foot-high geyser of metallic, fizzy water burst from the ground. It took three weeks to shut off then.

Lawsuits and headaches have flowed from it since. After experts warned of the threats of the well bursting - the city's beloved mineral springs running dry, sinkholes forming in downtown Manitou, the contamination of Fountain Creek - Thurston found herself facing tens of thousands of dollars in costs to fix a well she had been told was plugged when she bought the land.

"It was a disaster waiting to happen," said University of Colorado research associate Fred Luiszer, the foremost expert on Manitou's unique hydrology.

"If that was left in a situation where it had gone out of control, it could potentially do some long-term damage to the aquifer," said Dave Wolverton, president of the nonprofit Mineral Springs Foundation. "It was kind of a ticking bomb."

It is a story that begins in 1978 with a witch.

• • •

Claude Taylor could pick a good spot for a well using just his wood witching wand. He claimed to have once done it from 2,000 feet up in an airplane.

"I've been witching since 1947 and never found a dry hole," Taylor, a "dowser" or "water witcher," told The Gazette in November 1978. "But I sure never hit this big a well before!"

He was referring to the mess in Roy McClurg's yard.

McClurg owned the Buffalo Bill Wax Museum, at 402 Manitou Ave., next to the Briarhurst Manor. The wax museum, a 30-year staple of the Manitou tourist circuit, housed more than 100 wax likenesses of the outlaws, pioneers and statesmen who shaped Colorado Springs and the West.

McClurg, who planned a trout pond and fountain to complement the museum, hired Taylor to pick a spot for a well and a crew to drill it. According to a report later submitted to the Colorado Division of Water Resources, experts thought water could be tapped from 100 to 800 feet below the property, though the deepest well on record in Manitou at the time was only 200 feet.

They began drilling Nov. 15, 1978. Three days later, at 10 a.m., after punching 635 feet through layers of rock and clay, yellow, sulfur-smelling water began to gush out. The alarmed contractor withdrew the drill, and a geyser of water shot 80 feet into the air.

Four-inch-wide rocks fired into the air "like missiles," according to The Gazette, and the warm, fizzy, mineral-laden water flowed into Fountain Creek, so much that Colorado Springs officials had to shut down the Mesa Water Treatment Plant downstream. Officials at Penrose Hospital, which got its water from the plant, complained the water was disrupting their laboratory tests.

"It was too hard to treat," recalled James Phillips, Colorado Springs' director of utilities at the time, in a recent interview. "We didn't want it in the regular water supply."

The water, he said, "tasted terrible."

The account of the efforts to stem the flow reads like a struggle with a wild beast. For 22 days, crews puzzled over how to plug the well. They capped it, with a discharge valve to ease pressure. Sodalike water sprayed 15 feet out of the valve until it was shut. The pipes vibrated with the pressure blasting upwards at 6.25 feet per second.

Crews battled snow and ice, and water pressure that refused to be tamed. At one point, when the pressure valve was shut, water burst to the surface 100 feet away, in the driveway of Briarhurst. Experts determined they would need the same type of equipment used to plug an oil well.

It took four tries and 1,000 sacks of cement to plug the well between Dec. 1 and 9, because cement kept dropping out of the bottom of the well, into what experts suspect is an underground cave. The last effort succeeded, after engineers decided to mix cement with kerosene, which is lighter than water.

The report states 150 million gallons of mineral water, heavy in sodium, calcium and bicarbonate, supersaturated with carbon dioxide, flowed into Fountain Creek over three weeks, about 225 Olympic-size swimming pools' worth.

It was, the report stated, a conservative estimate.

• • •

The mineral water that flows out of the springs in Manitou comes from deep below Pikes Peak, 20 or 30 miles, said Luiszer, the CU expert.

In 1978, each spring was thought to be self-contained, because they have their own distinct tastes and chemical make-up. But Luiszer's research has shown that there is in fact a subterranean cave system that connects them all, and that the water flows downhill to the east. As elevation lowers, pressure in the water builds, up to a fault line running from Garden of the Gods park to the south, which acts like an underground barrier.

Luiszer believes the drill penetrated one of the underground caves, where the water is under such pressure it gushed up like Old Faithful.

"What happens, anywhere you drill into that limestone, if you are unlucky enough to actually hit a cave system, then it's connected to millions and millions of gallons of mineral water," Luiszer said. "As soon as they hit the limestone, soon afterwards they hit apparently a cave system that was able to produce ungodly amounts of mineral water."

Despite the costs and difficulty of plugging the well, McClurg asked the Colorado Division of Water Resources in the spring of 1979 for a permit to use the well.

"If this valuable resource is not allowed to be put to beneficial use, significant quantities of water shall remain undeveloped underground at a time when new sources of water are sought for an expanding population," wrote Lloyd Hershey, who oversaw work on the test well for McClurg.

The agency denied the permit. The well head was covered with dirt and a barrel and lined with railroad ties, out of sight. In the mid-1990s, McClurg decided to close the wax museum.

About that time, Thurston, a Colorado Springs native living in Delaware, was looking for a location here for a bed-and-breakfast, where she could put her talents as a builder, painter and potter to work. She fell in love with the property, and decided to buy it. The seller, one of McClurg's corporations, acknowledged the presence of a well that had been drilled without a permit and plugged. They went to closing on April Fool's Day, 1996.

"Only later did I found out from other residents that nobody in Manitou would buy it, because of the well," she said.

When she discovered the well during landscaping work, she initially hoped to lease or sell water to the city, for possible use in a swimming pool, but the state denied a well permit in May 1998. So she went on with her business, building the 10-room bed-and-breakfast and left the well alone.

Until it began to leak.

She noticed a drip around January 2007 and applied to the state for a well monitoring permit. A well inspector told her it would have to be fixed promptly, or the state could order it. The Mineral Springs Foundation, which had long been aware of the well, voiced concern the well could be a year or less from breaking and urged Thurston to make repairs. Manitou Springs City Council discussed the well.

The worst-case scenario was the well head, rusty from three decades of mineral water, its valves mineralized into immobility, could burst, and water flowing out could drain the mineral springs aquifer much more quickly than it could be replaced, causing the mineral springs to run dry.

"If that well is left uncapped and it keeps flowing at 1,500 gallons a minute, it would deplete that water in that aquifer," said Luiszer, who has worked with Thurston. "All the springs in Manitou would stop flowing."

The concern goes beyond tourism. If the underground caves that hold the water were emptied, there would be the possibility of sinkholes and even wide-scale collapses in downtown Manitou, Luiszer said.

• • •

Exactly how the supposedly plugged well began to leak is a source of contention. Thurston believes, after the 1978 cement plugging, it was re-opened to provide access to the water.

Wolverton, of the Mineral Springs Foundation, and Luiszer both doubt it was properly plugged.

Dave McElhaney, who oversees the well inspection program for the Division of Water Resources, said the agency's files indicate the well was plugged in 1978 - but that was based on a report submitted by McClurg's driller. The state didn't have well inspectors then, he said.

"We had, of course, nobody there on site, that I'm aware of, that witnessed it," he said.

To plug a well in the 1970s required 5 feet of cement poured above each aquifer. The requirement is 40 feet today. But that doesn't explain why the well leaked, McElhaney said. It was supposed to be a permanent solution.

"Did somebody go in and drill it out, or did it just eventually push its way through some small cracks and wash its way through? We don't know the answer to that," he said.

Thurston's problems, meanwhile, were mounting. To fix the well would cost tens of thousands of dollars. The uncertainty around the well was making it difficult to get financing to pay back her loan from the McClurg family, she said. She stopped paying on the loan in April 2007, and found herself in foreclosure.

And thoughts of what would happen if the well burst outside the bed-and-breakfast, where she also lives, kept her up at night.

Roy McClurg died in 1997. But Thurston discovered that, before the sale, he had transferred ownership of the well from the corporation that sold the land to another of his corporations, so she sued to stop the public sale of her property, and to prove that McClurg's son, Michael McClurg, owned the well.

McClurg, who lives in Castle Rock, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Thurston eventually got financing to redeem the property and rescue it from foreclosure. In September, on the eve of a trial to determine who owned the well, the sides reached a settlement, which Thurston said covered about one-third of her combined legal bills and well repair costs.

Last month, just a few weeks shy of the 30th anniversary of the well's being drilled, it was permanently sealed and encapsulated in cement, which will make it safe for at least 200 years, she said.

Thurston said proudly the four days the Blue Skies Inn was closed for well repairs are the only days it has ever been closed.

• • •

Though it took a witch to find the well site, experts say there are plenty of places on the west side of Colorado Springs and east side of Manitou where someone could strike such a geyser, but nobody has since 1978.

"Since then, I think anyone who has any brains probably heard about this problem and hasn't drilled that deep," said Luiszer.

In recent years, Manitou officials have put a moratorium on new wells, though Colorado Springs declined to do the same. Luiszer believes the moratorium should be in effect throughout the aquifer.

"If you want the springs in Manitou to continue to flow naturally, you have to make sure no new wells are drilled and old ones like this are maintained correctly," he said.

Thurston, meanwhile, has decorated the boxed-in well, to let it blend in as much as possible at the quaint bed-and-breakfast. The state wrote her Oct. 24, "The repairs you completed have stabilized the well head and prevented an eminent threat of contamination to the groundwater of the state of Colorado or to the health and welfare of its citizens."

And she sleeps a lot better these days, even though she knows the well is still here.

"We think we're going to rename the well ‘The Sleeping Goddess,'" she said. "Because it's just asleep."

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CONTACT THE WRITER: 476-1605 or srappold@gazette.com