It didn’t bother him that it was late at night and early in the morning when he had to schlep outside of his home, meet up with a couple other volunteers and go read water meters or walk stretches of the distribution lines.
Those were the only hours the village of Questa was still enough to do his work.
During the last weeks of December and the first weeks of January, Garcia helped Questa’s officials and employees troubleshoot the deceptively complex problems that led to the water crisis, an outage that left most of the village’s residents without running water for over a month during last year’s Christmas season.
"It’s better," Garcia said.
But the issues with the village’s water system go much further back than that.
When Danny Garcia was the utilities superintendent for the village in the 1980s, "we knew there were some problems even back then," he said.
And there were a lot of problems.
But after they fixed that issue and got water in the major distribution lines going to the schools and some residents, pressure built and in a couple of places popped the lines like an over-inflated bicycle tire, Garcia said.
Volunteers had to walk the water lines in order to find the leaks caused by too much pressure.
The village has to absorb the cost of the new well, about $300,000, because it is an infrastructure upgrade.