Liberty Utilities is still misplacing a lot of water. Technically, the industry calls that category of water “lost or unaccounted for.” Whatever name one would like to use, the water company that provides service to Pine Bluff doesn’t know what happens to almost 19 out of every 100 gallons it produces.
For the year 2020, that came to 724 million gallons. Play around with that number a bit, but you’ll need a calculator. Divide it by the number of days in a year and it’s right at 2 million gallons lost and unaccounted for each and every day. As in poof; it was here a minute ago.
The industry average for water companies is to have a figure for lost and unaccounted for water of some 15%. Two years ago, the utility’s number for this segment of its production was close to a billion gallons.
The argument has been — and continues to be — that if Liberty was making sure that its system was at least a little more water tight, the devastating winter water disaster that occurred in February wouldn’t have been so devastating.
That argument would seem to, er, hold water, given that, during the storm, the problem was that too much water was leaking out of the broken lines around town for the system to be able to maintain sufficient pressure.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
So if, say, instead of 2 millions of gallons disappearing each day, there was “only” 1 million vanishing, the pressure might have been maintained at a higher level and, well, residents and businesses and institutions might have been able to cope instead of having to scramble for water or close.
There’s also the environmental part of this. Water is a precious commodity. Ask a city that depends on snowpack and rain how it’s going when there hasn’t been much of either. Pine Bluff sits on a huge aquifer of fresh, clean water and is the envy of many other cities for that reason. But it’s not an infinite amount of water, and scientists will tell you that across this part of the state, the recharge rate for aquifers doesn’t necessarily keep up with how much is used.
So not only does the almost 19% of lost water likely point to a system that is not being well maintained, but every gallon that is wasted in this way is an irresponsible and unnecessary use of a natural resource. As a reminder, the water is this community’s and not Liberty’s to mishandle.
When asked about the situation, a Liberty spokesperson pointed to the improvement in the lost and unaccounted for total. That’s true, Liberty did better from 2019 to 2020. But if one looks back at 2018, the company’s lost and unaccounted for water volume was a mere 276 million gallons, meaning the company lost more than 2.5 times more water in 2020 than in 2018. So, really, they’ve nothing to brag about at this point.