It's the spring of 2011. Northwest of Santa Fe, the Rio Grande is rushing past Diablo Canyon, but instead of continuing south toward Albuquerque, some of the muddy water is moving in a different direction.

Beneath the surface, machines suck at the river along its banks, drawing millions of gallons of water into the most expensive infrastructure project the Santa Fe region has ever seen.

If all goes according to plan, that vision will play out for the joint city/county Buckman Direct Diversion, which has been under construction for just over a year and is reported to be on schedule and within its $216 million budget.

The project starts at the river, where just last week workers completed a coffer dam to temporarily remove water from the construction site. Early Thursday morning, they donned waders and carried nets into the chilly river to make sure no fish ended up on the wrong side of the sheet-metal enclosure.

Taking care of the wildlife in the area is among the promises project planners made to the federal Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service, said project manager Rick Carpenter.

Other promises include that trees will be saved and replanted, concrete will be colored in shades that match the landscape, and even rattlesnakes that have slithered into work areas will be carefully escorted to site boundaries.

"The resource agencies do keep a pretty close eye on us with regard to our stewardship of the resources, which include the snakes," explained Carpenter.

Along the river, 13 temporary dewatering pumps are busily now moving subsurface flows out of the dam area and back into the river a few feet downstream. The site will eventually house the raw-water lift station and its giant pumps, which will send water uphill to the first step of sediment removal.

Sand that is separated from the water less than a mile from the river will be returned to the riverbed. Meanwhile, water will move through two booster stations that use several 900-horsepower motors to help push it through an 11-mile pipeline already buried along Buckman Road and marked by blue posts.

When the untreated water arrives at its destination off Caja del Rio Road, its first stop is a wait in another set of sedimentation ponds. The twin pits, more than twice the length of a football field and deep enough to hold a two-story building, can be periodically drained for bottom scraping.

While each pit already has a concrete bottom, workers will soon begin lining the walls. Adjacent to them is another set of concrete-lined ponds, these with more sophisticated equipment for flocculation, a chemical process that removes more junk from the water.

The 22-acre water-treatment campus already features a cluster of buildings in various stages of completion. At its center is the "high-tech treatment building," which includes a row of 12-foot-diameter vessels for granular activated carbon filtration. Another building will house two centrifuges, which will spin water to remove more sediment.

A 4 million-gallon storage tank is painted green and partially buried. Also already buried underground is a feature that shoots ozone gas into the water as part of the treatment process.

The site is also the temporary heart of the construction project. Although the number of workers on-site peaked at about 250 this summer, there are still around 185 people at work there, according to Ray Selvy, the manager for CH2MHill/Western Summit, the firms that designed and are building the project.

Parked alongside their personal vehicles are seven mobile office trailers, two warehouses and a few campers for site supervisors who spend the night for security and convenience. When construction is complete, all that will be gone, most of area will be revegetated, and a small office building will provide work space for about a half dozen people on-site to operate the facility each day.

This month, project planners will begin recruiting for a training and certification program they hope will help fill 26 new full-time jobs for the diversion. Testing for the project systems is set to begin next October.

The city and county are paying the capital cost of the project through a combination of bonds and water-rate revenues. They will also share proportional costs of its ongoing operations.

Contact Julie Ann Grimm at 986-3017 or jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.