Two dozen or so demonstrators gathered at Matrimony Spring last weekend to insist that the water flow freely. Most who assembled seemed aware of but unconcerned by the potential dangers of drinking from the untreated water source.

“There might be little strains here and there,” David Earl Brown said of the coliform bacteria that have shown up in the water. “But that’s going to happen when you’re seeping through sandstone. This might be the safest water sources anywhere. This stuff is filtering for so long; it’s taking years to get to this point.”

Moab resident Carly Williams was one of the north-end residents who last year detected trace levels of volatile organic compounds coming from the city’s Skakel water tank after the tank was repainted. Williams said it took more comprehensive testing from the state to verify that problem, and she hopes the state can provide guidance in this case.

“We’d like to see some sound science behind the closure,” Williams said. “It’s not just a matter of it being an icon, and all the other things we like about the spring, but we’d like to see the science behind it, that it’s a real health risk for anyone to use the water. If that’s established, and we can believe in that science, then I’ll buy it.”

“But I wouldn’t,” resident Kaki Hunter said. “I’d rather have it be ‘drink at your own risk,’ as any other water that’s running free here. There are a lot of springs in the area, like Kane Creek Springs, which people have been drinking from for many years, and have still not gotten sick. And according to the science for that spring, it has a much higher bacteria count.”

It isn’t the current bacteria count per se that caused Southeastern Utah District Health Environmental Health Scientist Jim Adamson to close the spring. The bacteria, coupled with gnat larvae found in the water, suggest the spring has been breached, and that water is seeping in from nearby, not just filtering down from the mountains, Adamson has said.

That could introduce fresh contaminants that wouldn’t be filtered out through sand and stone, and which could get into the water fairly quickly. The source of contaminants could be as simple as a diseased bird relieving itself above the spring, Adamson said.

Brown isn’t fazed by such possibilities. “There are chances of that happening anywhere with a water source,” he said. “Nowadays, we do a lot of that stuff to ourselves anyway. The bird scenario sounds like a good shake of the dice to me, compared to what we’re doing to ourselves.”