Grand Canyon National Park officials began distributing bottled water to park residents during a community meeting Wednesday night.
Park leaders urged people to only use tap water for hygiene purposes and save bottled water for cooking and drinking.
The park is home to federal staff and concessionaire employees who work in hotels, restaurants and other businesses.
Officials put stage 4 water restrictions, the second highest level of restrictions for the park. Those were put in place following last weekend’s catastrophic flooding in Bright Angel Creek that destroyed approximately 40% of the Transcanyon Waterline that supplies that South Rim with water.
“What we do collectively over the next days really matters,” Grand Canyon Park Chief of Interpretation and Education AJ Lapre told the gathered crowd Wednesday. “This is a collective effort. We all come here to work here. We're all here to serve the visitor. We're here to serve this place that we all love. But right now we have to serve each other also.”
Deputy Park Superintendent Brian Drapeaux told KNAU that crews got their first look at system’s water intake at Roaring Springs below the North Rim along with the newly built infrastructure at Bright Angel Creek Wednesday.
Both are damaged, but the extent remains unclear.
And Drapeaux said it’s still too early to know how long repairs will take.
Drapeaux added they are not planning to close the park to day-use visitors.
“It's not on the table,” Drapeaux said. “We were here to serve the public, and we will continue to serve the public to our best ability, given any water situation or any other infrastructure challenges that we face.”
Hotels on the South Rim remain closed to overnight guests.
Drapeaux said trucking water in is a possibility that may be explored, but there are challenges regarding infrastructure and regulation they’ll first have to overcome.
Officials told park residents at the Wednesday meeting that the water storage tanks are nearly full with 21 feet of water.
But on a typical day, the water level in those tanks drops by about half a foot, making water conservation critical.
“We can sort of see how much water we use a day. We'd like to see that cut in half than what we normally see now,” Lapre said. “Don't get in the shower for, I would suggest, more than five minutes. While you're running your shower or your baths, have a bucket in there and capture that water until it gets warm enough for you to get into it. That water in that bucket can be used for a variety of things.”
Drapeaux is currently acting superintendent for the park while Ed Keable is on “emergency family leave,” according to the park.
“[Keable] is being briefed daily by me. So, he's fully engaged from his location and, of course, is helping with the messaging and the overall approach, given the family crisis that he's facing,” Drapeaux said. “So, he's engaged, he's informed, and although he's not present, he's present as far as I'm concerned.”
