By Tabitha Evans Moore | EDITOR & PUBLISHER
LOCAL NEWS | Local water loss has been a thorn in the side of the Metro Utilities Department for over 20 years. MUD employees spend endless hours driving local backroads looking for and repairing leaks. Office staff pour over bills looking for discrepancies. Two years ago, MUD wholesale replaced every residential and commercial meter in the county to improve accuracy. Additionally, MUD officials have placed seven zoned meters throughout the county – Cobb Hollow, Lois Ridge, Highway 55 at the high school, Buckeye, Bull Run, Highway 55 South, and at Jack Daniel’s North – to catch the issue. Nothing has worked.
And on Monday night, with state officials breathing down their collective throats, the MUD Board voted unanimously to add one more tactic: a zone meter study that will compare raw water numbers coming into certain areas to residential meters to catch discrepancies.
Water loss above 40 percent for the past three years
MUD measures water loss by looking at the actual number of gallons treated and pumped into the system and comparing that to the number of gallons billed to customers each month. According to MUD officials, in December, the Water Treatment Plant finished around 24,000,000 gallons of water and then sold 10,000,000 gallons. That’s an estimated water loss of 61.4 percent. That’s a level that neither local nor state officials find acceptable.
So why does water loss matter? It’s important for three specific reasons. One, every thousand gallons treated and pumped through the local water plant comes with an associated cost such as labor, chemicals, and pumping charges. Two, water loss equals water not being sold to customers, which affects MUD’s bottom line and their ability to fund infrastructure improvements. Ultimately, this trickles down to residents in the form of increased rates. And thirdly, this number is monitored closely by state officials who can issue a court order and take over operations of a local utility if the issue isn’t resolved in what they consider a reasonable amount of time.
All systems experience some non-revenue water loss from things like fire hydrant usage, tank maintenance, flushing lines, and other necessary operations. Losses also come from infrastructure issues like leaks, breaks, and overflows as well as systematic issues like faulty meters, billing errors, and illegal taps. For the past three years, Metro Moore County’s water loss has hovered above 40 percent – garnering the attention of state officials who have put the local system on notice.
According to Tennessee Code Annotated 7-82-702, any system that reports water loss above 40 percent must conduct additional investigation and review to mitigate the loss. State officials allow 20 percent of treated water to be non-revenue water loss for things like Metro Fire Department use and line flushing.
On Monday night, the five-member Metro Utility Board unanimously agreed to pursue faulty meters as the potential culprit and submit a Water Loss Control Plan to state officials to avoid state-level intervention. Greg Guinn made the motion and Barry Posluszny seconded.
A two-phase approach
Lots of theories – both inside and outside the utility – exist to the causes of the water leaks. Some suggest illegal taps or unintentional unmetered use. Others believe that high pressure and old lines in certain parts of the county could be producing massive leaks. Without proof, there’s no real path forward. Instead, local officials end up playing a game of whack-a-mole throughout the county.
The plan MUD officials submitted to state officials on Tuesday attacks the water loss issue in two phases. In the first phase, MUD officials will analyze usage flowing through those seven zone meters and compare it against the residential meters tied to each zone meter. A discrepancy would point out potential issues.
During Monday’s meeting, both MUD Board members and engineer Bryant Griffin stated that they strongly suspected that some of the new residential multi-jet meters are failing. Phase one would allow raw data that could prove or disprove that theory. Griffin – who works for Heathcoat and Davis – served as the MUD engineer from 2002-2018. The MUD Board recently placed him back on retainer for special projects.
On average a Moore County household uses around 4,000 gallons of water. A meter reading well above that could indicate a leak. If a customer receives a minimum bill, that could indicate a problem at the meter.
It’s a point the current MUD Board Chair Shane Taylor pushed back on slightly.
“My question is this: if we think these new meters are part of the problem, then why did we have a 40 percent plus water loss before they were replaced? Water loss has been that way ever since I came on this board in 2020.”
According to MUD internal documents, water loss hovered around 36 percent in 2017 and decreased slightly to 34 percent in 2018. It remained steady at 33 percent in 2019 and then jumped to 52 percent in both 2020 and 2021. Last year, local water loss came in at around 43 percent.
That consistent water loss rate has resulted in multiple notices from state officials and Taylor stated in the meeting that MUD replaced older analog meters with newer digital meters specifically to address the water loss situation. Those replacements came online in October 2020 and at the suggestion of Tennessee’s Water Regulatory Board.
It’s also important to note that prior to 2019, utilities were allowed to figure leaks and non-revenue losses into their water loss counts. That is no longer the case, according to MUD officials. MUD officials also stated that they are aware of at least one other regional utility experiencing issues with the same brand of meters, so this seemed a logical place to start.
The second phase would involve replacing 25-30 residential meters with known water leaks that also seem to have non-functioning meters.
“The leak detection device we recently purchased is detecting a leak on the customer’s side and the meter is not registering the usage,” MUD Manager Ronnie Cunningham stated during Monday’s meeting.
The Board instructed Cunningham to purchase 30 new ultrasonic meters – as opposed to current multi-jet meters – to prove a meter malfunction. The purpose is to produce video proof that the leak is being detected without the anticipated meter movement.
Board passes on a third party consulting proposal
One proposal not adopted at Monday’s meeting came from E Source – a company that offers water loss control technical assistance to utilities located through the U.S. Their proposal involved using a data-driven approach that uses water audit software to compare the volume of water supplied to all known volumes of withdrawal to deduce losses.
The independent third party would then look for duplicate records, negative uses volume, large suspicious usage to identify things like stuck meters, unbilled or unmetered consumption, and meter inaccuracies. That project would also result in a GIS Map on the local water system – something the state has been suggesting for some time now.
“The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) wants our system to be digitally mapped,” MUD’s Brooke Fanning stated in the meeting.
The estimated price tag of this third party consulting was a little over $115,000. The Board chose to take no action on that proposal. Opting instead to go with their two-prong approach using local staff and being spearheaded by Bryant.
The Metro Utilities Board meets every second Tuesday of the month. Their next meeting will take place on Tuesday, February 13 at 6 p.m. at the MUD offices located at 705 Fayetteville Highway in Lynchburg. All meetings are open to the public and any concerned citizen may either ask to be added to the agenda or show up and be heard on any agenda item during the public comment period. To be added to the agenda, contact the MUD offices at 931-759-4297. •
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