The EWUA Board would like to congratulate both its staff and its membership on recent gains in water conservation. Washington State’s new “Municipal Water Law” has established specific efficiency goals that are designed to insure that water systems are using the public’s water resources in an efficient manner. The “Muni Law”, as it is called, sets an efficiency goal of 90%. This means a water system should have no more than 10% “unaccounted for water”.

“Unaccounted for water” is any water that has not been put to beneficial use. Every water purveyor has a certain number of leaks and inefficiencies in its distribution system. As recently as the year 2000 EWUA had up to 24% unaccounted for water. For the period between January 2006 and October 2006 EWUA can report it has reduced its unaccounted for water to 11%. This is major progress, with more efforts underway.

During January of 2007 EWUA organized a two day leak detection effort with a specialist from Evergreen Rural Water Association. The effort uncovered a number of additional minor leaks to help continue our efficiency improvements. When originally introduced the “Muni Law” efficiency standards were quite daunting. However, they have provided an important motivation to increase efforts to using our water resources as efficiently as possible.

Every leak has a major impact on the system. Just one pencil sized leak can account for as much as 4% of the overall system’s annual consumption. Talk about a needle in a haystack! That pencil size leak could be anywhere along over 40 miles of underground piping, and the leaking water might never actually come to the surface.