Water & Sanitation Department

The Metro District drinking water system is comprised of three groundwater wells, two well houses with pumping and treatment equipment, a pump station in Lewis Ranch to convey water to our higher elevation customers, two water storage tanks, and over five miles of buried pipe that carries water to your faucet.

Situated very near the top of the Blue River Watershed, the Metro District and its customers benefit from a virtually pristine water supply. Potential upstream sources of contamination are comparatively few and ours is an entirely groundwater-based system. The drinking water at Copper Mountain comes from three wells located within the West Ten Mile Creek alluvium. Our source water quality is exceptional and fully compliant with Primary Drinking Water Standards promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency and enforced locally by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Because of the exceptional quality of the source water, the only treatment process that the Metro District employs is limited chemical disinfection, prior to delivering the water to our customers. Please visit the Water Quality Reports section of our website for more information on water quality and supply.

Three centrifugal pumps provide the energy to pump water from the Metro District’s wells, into the distribution system, and finally to you, our customers. The distribution system consists of all the buried piping, water storage tanks, fire hydrants, and pumping equipment needed to operate and control the flow of water at Copper Mountain. We have two water storage tanks; one on the mountain on forest service and one in Lewis Ranch that hold 250,000 gallons and 750,000 gallons, respectively. Coupled with a combined groundwater pumping capacity of approximately 1,750 gallons per minute, the distribution system is more than capable of meeting the demands of the resort and the community, including emergency fire operations.

Metro District Water and Sanitation facilities are staffed seven days a week by an exceptional group of dedicated individuals. Because the Metro District is responsible for all water treatment and distribution, and all wastewater treatment and collection, our operators must be highly educated and licensed. They are an ambitious and hard-working group of people who are committed to environmental stewardship and the protection of public health.

What goes up must come down. Or in the case of water, what gets pumped out of the ground and distributed to the Metro District’s customers, must eventually flow through the sewer system to the Wastewater Treatment Facility (WWTF). Our WWTF has the capacity to treat 1.1 million gallons of wastewater per day, but we typically operate well below that maximum. The WWTF employs a sophisticated, industrial-scale treatment process that includes primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of treatment. Primary treatment is where inorganic solids (toilet paper, rags, dirt/rocks, etc…) are removed from what we call the process stream, or the water that will be treated and ultimately returned to Ten Mile Creek. Secondary treatment is where all the real magic happens. Our secondary treatment process is what is called an activated sludge/biological nutrient removal process where a diverse microbial population removes the organic matter from the process stream by converting it into cellular growth (more microbes that do the work), innocuous atmospheric gases, and water. The microbial population resides in large aeration basins where the air that provides the oxygen that the microbes (we call them bugs) need is supplied. After a very specific and calculated amount of time in the aeration basins, the process stream flows to large settling basins called clarifiers. Here the water is allowed to acquiesce and become very still, allowing time for the bugs to settle to the bottom where they are collected and pumped back to the beginning of the biological process in the aeration basins. The “clean” water from the clarifiers, called secondary effluent, spills over the top of the clarifiers and is subsequently pumped to our tertiary filters that remove any remaining nutrients that may be harmful to the natural aqueous environment. After filtration, the effluent stream is disinfected by being exposed to ultraviolet light, preventing any remaining bugs from being able to replicate. The end result is a very high-quality finished effluent stream that is returned to the environment through our outfall to Ten Mile Creek.

Regulatory oversight of wastewater treatment is administered at the federal level by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and at the state level by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE). The CDPHE issues the permit for the Metro District’s WWTF. Permit structure is complicated as it specifies and defines all of our operational parameters and requirements. These include a long list of permit limits for the effluent stream that must be continuously monitored, measured, and reported to the CDPHE. Our operations staff does a phenomenal job of optimizing WWTF processes and operation and of ensuring that we always meet regulatory compliance.

Summit County Irrigation Schedule

Last full number in address	Nights to Water	Time to Water
Even	Tue, Thu, Sat	Overnight, 6pm – 9am
Odd	Wed, Fri, Sun	Overnight, 6pm – 9am

For additional resources on outdoor water efficiency check out High Country Conservation Center website’s Water Smart Irrigation page.

More information can be found  on The Colorado Special Districts Property and Liability Pool Website

CLICK HERE to Download Sewer Backup Information Sheet

CLICK HERE for more information