WESTERNPORT — Westernport’s rate of water loss due to leaking lines and excessive use in un-metered homes is far greater than town officials have long believed, a discouraging revelation that may nevertheless play to the town’s benefit in obtaining grant funds to improve the aging system.
Addressing a relatively light crowd of about 15 people at Monday night’s monthly council meeting, Council member and Water Commissioner Thomas “Tuck” Martin said he compiled figures that allowed him to compare the total amount of water the town is processing versus the amount that it sells to water system users.
On average, he said, the town is receiving payment for 224,600 gallons of water a day. Averaged over a 30-day period production, though, total production amounts to 555,270 gallons. That’s a difference of 330,000 gallons, which makes for a water-loss rate of more than 100 percent – meaning the town is processing, filtering and chemically treating twice as much water as it actually needs.
Martin said he’d long assumed that the town was losing about 130,000 gallons a day.
“It’s a lot worse than I thought,” he said.
The problem of leaking water lines is common to older communities throughout America, where water systems with pipes 75-100 years old or older are beginning to give up the galvanized ghost due to corrosion and simple old age.
While the biggest leaks are usually easy to spot when water bubbles from the ground or courses down a street, many leaks large and small can go undetected for extended periods of time, with the water following a path underground and emerging far from the source of the leak, if it comes to the surface at all.
The city of Keyser is grappling with similar problems and recently hosted a specialist who worked over the course of one week through the night-time hours when water use is limited, using a specialized acoustic device to listen for water leaks. City officials said they have several promising “leads” from the man’s work, but they did not detect any major leaks.
Keyser officials estimate water loss at about 30-35 percent. However, the city has been unable to obtain a hard figure from the method Martin used in Westernport, because officials in the billing department have not been able to provide baseline data for total amount of water billed. Councilman Dave Sowers said he is working to sort out that tangle.
In Westernport, the water-loss rate was developed as part of Martin’s ongoing efforts to obtain funding for a three-phase water system improvement project. The first phase, to begin in January, will involve a complete overhaul of the town’s water treatment plant to bring it up to current standards. The second phase will erect a new water tank on Westernport Hill and extend water lines to NewPage paper mill and the town of Luke, providing additional revenue to Westernport.
The third phase, which is probably the most ambitious, would replace water lines throughout Westernport, and install taps on the more than 400 homes in town whose consumption is not measured. Such residences pay a flat monthly water rate regardless of use.
Unmetered homes have been an ongoing source of tension in the community, with residents appearing at council meetings on an almost monthly basis to complain about unmetered neighbors who use water without thought to conservation, and pay less than they do.
A retired McKinley Street resident whose household consists of himself and his wife protested at Monday night’s meeting about a neighbor with five-member household – including three teenage girls – which is unmetered. He said the man recently ran a pressure washer for three straight days, “eight hours a day,” without regard to use because his house is unmetered. Another time, the man said, the neighbor used a hose to clean the filters from his pool, and had the water running through the filters and into the gutter for hours on end, with no one even outside as the hose ran.
“I’m paying the same bill they’re paying, and more,” the man said.
Unlike others who have protested such disparities, he didn’t call on the town to meter his neighbor. Instead, he demanded that the town remove his water meter.
“It’s not right to me,” he said. “I’m asking tonight to be put on a fixed rate.”
Lamenting a limited budget that recently took a severe hit due to funding cutbacks from the state, town officials have said they simply cannot afford to install water meters on all of the properties that don’t have them. Earlier this year, however, council members announced an initiative to remove meters from unoccupied residences and install them at homes that feature pools, as part of an effort to measure – and bill -- consumption of high-use households.
There was no word Monday night on the status of that effort.
In announcing the extreme rate of water loss – most older communities average about 25 percent water loss – Martin did note a silver lining. Federal and state funding agencies hope to develop Westernport and its Savage River Reservoir as a regional water supply. With the latest figures showing such a high rate of loss, the town will be better positioned to seek grant funding to replace the lines.
“That should bode well for grant money…,” he said. “That’s a lot of water to be losing.”