Professor Wayne Wurtsbaugh makes a great point: Everyone reduced their water use by 20% this year, but the flow to Great Salt Lake only increased by 2.2% (“Lots of options are on the table for saving the Great Salt Lake. The simplest? Use less water.”).
Instead of begging for further reductions in domestic use (unlikely to happen and not very effective), we need to abandon using property taxes to cover water service; this retrograde system means that water authorities’ revenues are assured no matter how well or badly they run their systems.
If all domestic supplies were metered it would be obvious how efficient they were, in particular in managing leakage.
The latest report I can find on line is the Utah State Water Plan for 2013, which includes the truly amazing statement : “Fixing water leaks has not traditionally been part of future water planning”. That report gave Salt Lake City data for 2003 (!) as showing leakage of 4.3 million gallons/day, “a very creditable performance for a utility that does not have an active leakage control programme.”
Salt Lake City took action, and its water conservation plan for 2020 reported losses for 2016-2018 as averaging around 11 percent of production. However, that’s still far too high in a crisis. (Singapore, which is vulnerable because it’s largely dependent on water from Malaya, reports losses around 5 per cent).
Water service providers should reduce leaks to the economic minimum, and regularly report how well they are doing. That’s just good practice.
Richard Middleton, Salt Lake City