UPPER DELAWARE, N.Y.—Nearly two out of every 10 gallons of water tapped from the Delaware River basin to feed public water systems are lost in distribution before they reach end customers, according to a presentation at an Upper Delaware Council meeting on June 6.
The presentation was based on 10-year data collected from 300 participating public systems drawing water from the expansive basin, which stretches across four states on the East Coast.
More than 7 million people, or three out of four basin residents, rely on those public systems for drinking water. That number includes thousands of residents in the City of Port Jervis.
“It is a huge feat of engineering, which delivers hundreds of millions of gallons of drinking water to people across the basin,” Michael Thompson, senior water resource engineer of the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), said.
“It is critical to understand how efficiently this resource is managed.”
Since 2012, DRBC has collected annual water data from qualified utilities under an agreement to monitor water loss as part of its signature Water Audit Program, which is designed based on a well-established methodology developed by the International Water Association.
The program did not include major basin water exports to New York City and New Jersey.
Data suggest that public water loss in the basin remains consistent over the 10-year span. In 2023, participating public systems distributed 795 million gallons of treated water per day to customers, with about 20 percent of it ending up being real water loss, according to Mr. Thompson.
“It is [a] fairly large [amount] of water that is being tagged as real losses,” he said, adding that water leaks could occur throughout the distribution network, including water mains, service connections, and underground pipes leading up to individual meters.
It was calculated that more than 20 percent of the real water loss was unavoidable, according to Mr. Thompson.
“Regardless of how much money you throw into your leak detection and repair program or how you are operating your system, it is just a fact that all systems are going to leak,” he said, adding that the DRBC used a scientific method to arrive at a theoretical number of unavoidable loss.
Mr. Thompson said that he hopes these water loss data will inform future dialogues and initiatives about water efficiency and conservation, benefiting all stakeholders in the basin, including water utilities, residents, and ecosystems.
“As [Mr. Thompson] said, you cannot know what is recoverable if you don’t know what is being lost,” Upper Delaware Council Executive Director Laurie Ramie told The Epoch Times in a June 12 statement. “He ended with the wise quote ‘We never know the worth of water until the well runs dry.’”
“Drinking water is an essential use of our Basin’s resources,” DRBC Deputy Executive Director Kristen Bowman Kavanagh said in an earlier statement. “Through the water audit program, the DRBC now has a foundational dataset to support its Basin-scale planning efforts.”
