Leaky Pipes Are Costing New York Billions of Gallons of Water per Year

Most utilities barely track how much water they lose to leaks, but one thing is clear: Aging infrastructure is costing customers.

Colin Kinniburgh   ·   November 27, 2024
Workers walk inside of a New York City water tunnel.
Workers walk inside of a New York City water tunnel. | Photo: NYC Water / Flickr

Rain finally returned to New York City last week, breaking a nearly two-month dry spell.

But the downstate area is still in drought. The reservoirs that supply the city’s drinking water remain under 60 percent full as of Tuesday, compared to the usual 80 percent or more. This fall is on track to be the second- or third-driest in the city since the National Weather Service began collecting records in the late 1860s. The state’s head of emergency management has warned that, unless New York City continues to get heavy rain every few weeks, the region could fall into a “drought emergency,” which would trigger mandatory restrictions on water use.

As the drought continues, officials are urging residents to take shorter showers, report leaky hydrants, and “stop using water that isn’t absolutely essential” — standard messaging during dry spells that recalls the “Keep New York Wet” PSA issued during the city’s last wave of severe droughts in the 1980s.

These admonitions, however, leave out a key source of water loss: leaky infrastructure. Last year, New York City gave away or lost about 15 percent of all the water that went through its pipes — some 155 million gallons per day. That figure includes all unbilled water, such as water used for system flushing, firefighting, and losses from billing issues.

But a large portion of the water loss is due to leaks. The city estimates that 35 million gallons per day leak from just one section of its main aqueduct, where major repairs were paused this month due to the drought.

Deputy Commissioner for the Bureau of Water Supply Paul Rush and Sean McAndrew of the Bureau of Engineering Design and Construction in yellow work vests inside of the bypass tunnel for the Delaware Aqueduct.
Major, water-saving repairs to the Delaware Aqueduct (pictured) were paused in November due to the drought. | NYC Water / Flickr

Upstate, the picture is often even worse. Syracuse, which has the state’s sixth-largest drinking water system, sells only 40 percent of the water that passes through its pipes, according to annual reports. The remaining 60 percent goes unaccounted for.

If those self-reported figures are accurate, they would add up to more than 8 billion gallons of water lost each year in just one city. (Sol Muñoz, a spokesperson for the city of Syracuse, noted that not all of the unsold water should be considered a loss, since it includes municipal uses as well as some supplied to nearby towns and villages.)

The Mohawk Valley Water Authority, which serves the Utica area, loses about half of its treated water. Its counterpart in Erie County, serving the Buffalo suburbs, loses about 40 percent. Yonkers and Rochester lose close to a quarter.

And Buffalo Water, which serves the city proper, does not report how much water it loses, even though the state mandates those disclosures. (Buffalo officials did not respond to New York Focus’s request for the figures.)

Even without including Buffalo, the state’s 10 largest water systems report losing the equivalent of almost 400 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water every day.

The problem is exacerbated by the age of New York’s water infrastructure, which ranks among the oldest in the country.

“These are oftentimes pipes that are over 100 years old. They’re aging, they’re crumbling, they’re rusting away, and that means that water is seeping out,” said Rob Hayes, director of clean water for the nonprofit Environmental Advocates NY. “This is water that has gone through the treatment plant, that is safe to drink, that is just going back into the ground and is not being used.”

Some experts in the water industry doubt that actual losses are anywhere near as high as those reported by cities like Syracuse.

Steve Cavanaugh, an engineer and consultant on water loss who chairs committees on the issue for both national and international trade associations, said the huge discrepancies in utility water loss rates are more about measurement than actual infrastructure.

Water is relatively plentiful and cheap in the northeast, so many water authorities barely scrutinize the millions of gallons that they’re losing or giving away — what the industry refers to as “non-revenue water.” Some systems may have old, mechanical meters that systematically undercount how much water customers actually use. Others may overestimate how much water they distribute in the first place, making it look like they’re losing more than they actually are.

Then there are reasons why a water system might intentionally discard some of its supply: For example, some require a higher flow through their pipes than others to prevent water from getting stale before it reaches people’s taps. Some may in fact have major underground leaks they don’t know about. But few utilities have tried to break down those factors, meaning they don’t know how much they lose to leaks — and, by extension, how worthwhile it is to spend money fixing those leaks.

Turn your phone to landscape to better view this visualization.

“The problem with leakage is you have to go and find it,” said Judith Hansen, a legislative consultant with the New York chapter of the American Water Works Association (AWWA), the main trade group for the US water industry.

Some utilities have begun proactive efforts to identify leaks. But New York, like most states, does not require water systems to submit standardized accounting.

As of 2022, only a dozen states — mainly in the southern and western US — have adopted the reporting standards favored by AWWA, and only four of them audit their underlying data to ensure it is valid, according to a survey by the trade group. (Cavanaugh’s firm co-authored the survey.)

New York is not one of those states. That means most of its utilities have only a very rough idea how much water they lose to leaks and how much that costs their customers.

Among the exceptions are some of the state’s smallest water providers: villages in the Catskills belonging to the four-state Delaware River Basin, where utilities are required to conduct audits. A 10-year survey published by the Delaware River Basin Commission last year found that leaks did make up the bulk of unbilled water, at a median rate of about 50 gallons per customer per day. Surveys in Georgia and California, which have passed laws requiring water system audits, found similar patterns.

While New York’s larger cities lack that kind of detailed data, it’s clear that leaks in their systems do cost customers, who pay their bills to treat millions of gallons of water that end up back in the ground.

But detecting and fixing leaks costs money, too.

“It doesn’t make sense to spend half a million dollars, in a smaller utility, chasing $50,000 worth of leakage,” Cavanaugh said. His mission is to help utilities find the sweet spot, where they can find and address leaks in a way that ultimately saves customers money. That starts with training staff to properly identify and measure sources of water loss.

Fixing leaks also helps the climate, he noted: It takes significant amounts of energy to treat and transport water, so every gallon lost to leaks creates unnecessary carbon emissions.

For clean water advocates, that’s just one more reason that the state needs to step up water infrastructure spending. Last year, the state legislature succeeded in preserving $500 million in annual funding for clean water infrastructure, which Governor Kathy Hochul had sought to cut in half. Hayes and other advocates are pushing to increase that amount to $600 million, but it could be an uphill battle during a year when state officials are once again asking agencies to plan for a flat budget.

When it comes to spending that money, Hansen said, leaks tend to slip down the list of priorities compared to health hazards like lead and “forever chemicals,” or PFAS.

Today’s warming climate could begin to shift that calculus, as historically water-rich New York increasingly swings between drought and floods.

“Water conservation will only become more important as the climate crisis intensifies,” Hayes said. “Given the scale of the problem that we’re facing, the scale of the solution that’s needed is a government-scale solution.”

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Colin Kinniburgh
Climate and Environmental Politics Reporter
Colin Kinniburgh is a reporter at New York Focus, covering the state’s climate and environmental politics. He has worked in media for more than a decade, across print, television, audio, and online news, and participated in fellowship programs at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism… more
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