City doesn’t know where 851 million gallons of missing water went

[doxydad]

851 million gallons of water, as the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier writes, is enough to fill, “1,300 Olympic-sized swimming pools in a year.” One would think that if 1,300 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of water went missing, it would be fairly easy to figure out why. Instead, Waterloo, Iowa officials like Water Works General Manager Dennis Clark, “just don’t know where it went.”


Weird.


http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/oddnews/city-doesn%E2%80%99t-know-where-851-million-gallons-of-missing-water-went-214457866.html

[DebJ]

1. Ironic this is in "Water-loo"

[liberal N proud]

2. Sounds like they need to read meters

Chances are, their meter readers are not actually reading meters, just making estimates.

[Angleae]

4. With about 68000 people, they're missing over 130000 gallons per person.

I don't think it has anything to do with meters, at least ones at homes.

[liberal N proud]

5. Some factories can use a lot of water

I know there was a couple of meat processing plants in Waterloo and I know they use tons of water. Other industries may also use a lot of water and if the city was just estimating water usage, they could be a large part of the problem.

I also suspect that someone sent some water down the river inadvertently.

[Major Nikon]

6. You should see all the water fracking uses

Just one county in Texas used 188 billion gallons of water in one year just for fracking alone. That's 220 times more than this town lost.

Meanwhile I've been on stage 1 water restrictions for almost a year now while fracking gets all the water it wants.

[pinboy3niner]

3. Okay, okay--so I was thirsty, alright?

[A Simple Game]

7. Might be time to calibrate the flow meters. n/t

[Jenoch]

8. One my fathers good friends bought a building lot on the edge of his town about thirty years ago.

The lot had a small crick running at the back of the lot. After building the house he checked on how much water was flowing through each day. (He was a soil and water conservationist, so he knew what he was doing).

He eventually built a small dam and created a pool of water that he used to water his lawn and flower/vegetable gardens. He said there was a local guy who said there was a spring up on the hill that fed into the creek. About 15 years after he built the house the creek went dry. There was a sinkhole up on the hill that exposed a broken water main. If he had tested the water, the test would have shown fluoride.

The guy that told my father's friend about the creek was the city public works director.

[Orrex]

9. It's probably under the bridge.