Mount Calvary Cemetery well is a dream come true

Intermountain Catholic

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Curt Rosentreter, director of Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery (left) and Mike Janson, a staff member, are grateful to have the well water spraying over the lawns at the cemetery. It has been a long time coming.IC photo by Christine Young

SALT LAKE CITY — "The well is a dream come true," said Chancellor Deacon Silvio Mayo. "The water from the well is now flowing and watering the lawns.

"When I first came to Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery in 1985, we were watering the cemetery with hoses," said Deacon Mayo. "All the staff at the cemetery had to go from plot to plot to change the hoses throughout the day and throughout the week.

"Since that time, we have installed a new sprinkling system and have built two mausoleums, and put a new front entrance to the cemetery," said Deacon Mayo. "Now the final touch is having our own well to water the entire cemetery at will. It is a great day for the cemetery. This saves us a lot of money. The water will be flowing now, and we hope to keep the cemetery a lot greener than it has been in the past."

They started drilling for the well April 9, and struck water April 20, at 280 feet down. They drilled down 450 feet looking for a flow of water at 100 gallons an hour. The ongoing expense for the cemetery over the years has been providing culinary water for the cemetery’s acres of grass.

"Water costs have almost quadrupled at this point, and have evolved into an important and current issue," said Curt Rosentreter, Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery director.

"This well gives the cemetery and the Diocese of Salt Lake City a lot of leverage. We have been spending $35,000 a year on water. Now most of that will go away with the little bit of water that we used with the building itself," said Rosentreter. "Now we can do other things that we need such as street repairs and other maintenance. There is certainly a little bit of a payoff that we have to make, but over time, approximately eight years depending on what the actual price of water is over the next few years. At today’s rate it will be about an eight- or nine-year pay back.

"The cemetery will always be the diocese’s responsibility, so in the long term at some point this cemetery will stop generating revenue to a great extent when we run out of graves and burials when it is literally full," said Rosentreter. "The diocese will still be responsible for mowing, trimming, watering, and upkeep of the cemetery.

"And that is how we really got started on this project," said Rossentreter. "There has been a lot of talk about the cemetery filling up. It is true. We are down to not having a lot of graves that could be sold. But with the graves we do have, the graves we reclaimed in a project a couple of years ago in which people purchased graves that have never been used and those people are no longer around, and also two-thirds of an acre we have not developed yet, and with the trend toward cremation where we can actually use older family graves to bury family members over the top of those graves in the form of cremations, we still expect the cemetery to be running and generating revenue upwards of 30 or 35 years. So it is not dooms day, but we are still thinking long-term how to position the cemetery for that day.

"One of the very obvious things was converting to a well for watering the cemetery," said Rosentreter. "So it is a major investment with both short-term and long-term advantages. We have finally reached our goal."

Rosentreter said they still have a lot of fine tuning to do now that the well is up and running – they have to learn how to use it.

"We have to make adjustments to make it more effective in watering," said Rosentreter. "And we want to do most of our watering at night."