Calculating Your Agency’s Leak Detection “Trigger”

Here, Matt Lyons from the Long Beach Water Department offers the first in a series of postings that will address the core problems with the CUWCC’s proposed BMP 3. He begins by providing 3 things all retail water agencies should keep in mind over the course of the BMP review process:

3 Things Retail Water Agencies Should Keep in Mind:

• AB 1420 (state law potentially denying state funds to agencies not in compliance with the BMPs) mostly applied to retail water agencies because they have the most measurable, difficult BMPs to achieve.
• Some BMPs are already too difficult for more retail water agencies to comply with; for example, more than half of the retail water agencies are out of compliance with BMP 1 (water audits) and BMP 6 (HECW Rebates), yet the proposed BMP 3 is much more challenging than either of them.
• Proposals cannot become a BMP without a majority approval from Group 1 members (water agencies).

In last week’s BMP 3 conference call, I mentioned that AWWA stated that a water agency with about 10% water losses could be considered a well-run water agency. A proponent of BMP 3 said I was not telling the truth. Ouch! So I disengaged from the call, located the article (AWWA’s “Opflow” Magazine, August 2007 pg 16), got back on the call and quoted the publication. Subsequent to the meeting, I emailed the CUWCC a summary of key problems with the proposal to change BMP 3. The problems are the same as many of those raised over the last 3 years. The CUWCC sent the summary to members of the committee, and posted it on their website.This week, just before the conference call to discuss BMP 3, the CUWCC emailed committee members a link to an email posted on the CUWCC website. the email, from a consultant who has been a long-time support of the proposed revisions to BMP 3, begins with a statement that some of my comments “appear to be misleading or technically wrong.” Ouch! Check it out here.

Here is one of the issues I was accused of being misleading or technically wrong on: that an “infrastructure Leakage Index” (ILI) of 3.0 could unaccount for water loss of as little as 4%. I bring it up because the issue is VERY important for retail water agencies. Read more about it here.

The point is, retail water agencies MUST KNOW what this ILI of 3.0 or greater means for their agency. Before supporting the CUWCC staff proposal, retail agencies are advised to run this simple experiment: generate the ILI of your agency by plugging your numbers into the AWWA water loss spreadsheet, multiply this ILI by 3.0, then divide it by the % unaccounted for water estimate that you submitted to the CUWCC in past BMP 3 reports. Doing this will tell you what an ILI of 3.0 means to your agency in terms that we are familiar with: % unaccounted for water you must get down to in order to avoid the onerous work required by the proposed BMP. Get a copy of the free software from AWWA here.

The second issue Reinhard claimed I was misleading or technically wrong on, i.e. how much money agencies should spend to “conserve” paper water, will be addressed in a forthcoming blog. Until then…

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 4:01 pm and is filed under CUWCC Group 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.