Water Transmission

Being in Austin, water is in the news at least once a year. Like other Colorado River communities, the water supply issue is a big concern. Couple drought with a massive influx of new residents, and it's not hard to see trouble on the way.

In all the discussion about rationing, conserving, etc., I've noticed that there's one little tidbit about water that hasn't been discussed-the efficiency of the water transmission infrastructure. Generally it's bad to awful for most communities-if a city gets 80% of the input water through the system, it's high-fives and backslaps all the way around. Getting 60-70% out is considered acceptable, 50% efficiency is time to worry.

Among other things, the water is lost because of old water pipelines. Water pipelines corrode, they get holes, water leaks out. In some cases, the original pipe corrodes away-there are some places where water is transmitted by the "fossilized" remains of the pipe, the actual pipe having been corroded away years ago. I know of a couple of cases where a utility found out that a pipe they've used for a hundred years turned out to be a section of stove pipe, and at least once case where the pipe turned out to be a log!

Granted, 100% efficiency is more a theoretical ideal than anything. There will always be some loss, that's an inescapable reality. But how nice would it be to squeeze an extra 10% out of a city's water supply? What if we made 80% efficiency acceptable and saved the kudos for 90% efficiency? It's an expensive proposition to replace all that dead infrastructure in every town and city along the Colorado, but it seems to me that it isn't enough to ask the consumers to conserve and be efficient. We should be asking the suppliers to do the same.