A Small Colorado Town Ran Out of Water | Hacker News Reader

A Small Colorado Town Ran Out of Water

kunc.org

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That was just lack of maintenance in a small town. Chennai, India, with over four million people, is out of water.[1] 200 days of no rain on top of overpopulation and limited water resources. Some water is being brought in by train and in tank trucks. "Local gangs taking control of public water taps and dominating supply from street-corner tanks is too common." There are some desalination plants, but not enough.

[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/why-chennais-water...

I saw articles years ago suggesting water would be the root cause of future wars. Water is currently a serious issue globally.

In the US, the waters of the Colorado River are over promised to several Southwestern states. California is very dependent on imported water.

Small towns have trouble getting adequately competent people for their needs. Critical professional positions can take ages to fill because they pay less and qualified people often don't want to live in the middle of nowhere.

Some bright spots:

There are underutilized technologies and techniques available today that can solve or mitigate a lot of these issues. But widespread adoption is a challenge.

In California, Fresno County is quietly a shining example of good water management in some respects. It is being largely overlooked, but has a history of actually increasing ground water levels at times while most of the rest of the world is seeing them steadily drop.

The internet, remote work and new technology offer hope of better solutions for small towns in the US, if only by making them more appealing to the types of professionals whose skills are so desperately needed in some places.

Let's be realistic, the future of many small towns is going to be bankruptcy and disincorporation. They just won't have the resources to continue operating and counties will have to take over everything.

> Critical professional positions can take ages to fill because they pay less and qualified people often don't want to live in the middle of nowhere.

On the plus side I'd hope there's good job security

You would think so, but these days the people running those small rural towns call long term knowledgeable professionals the "deep state"

Citation needed.

I don't really know, but my guess is "no." Small towns are probably even more vulnerable to economic downturns than larger cities and there isn't a lot of fat to cut when such happens.

> Critical professional positions can take ages to fill because they pay less and qualified people often don't want to live in the middle of nowhere.

Anytime you come across this exact scenario, it is a situation ripe for a business to come in and provide the service.

There is no need for a small town to have someone in house to fill this position year round. It can be outsourced to a business that provides service for multiple towns.

TLDR; Small town didn't detect multiple leaks in their water system until it was too late and they had to turn water off until the springs could re-fill their tanks. It happens.

You left out: It's a small scale disaster for an already poor community because businesses had to shut down for several days and cut employee hours. The town seemingly doesn't know how to recover from the financial blow.

You'd think people (edit: the water consumers) would want laws that prevent this kind of thing from happening (edit: having a leak that goes unfixed long enough for that much water to get away).

What sort of law would help with a situation like this?

We have laws requiring smog checks, requiring odometers not be tampered. Those apply to cars.

Why not laws requiring leakage check meters (or whatever would be the corresponding tech) to be installed for every mile of pipes? Pay it up one time and reap the benefits long term. You do not want to be wasting water for 3 months before finding out there is a problem.

I was trying to do a quick check on US law for water utilities, but there doesn't seem to be a single source of truth on that one.

Edit: the EPA seems to have a federal act on file for drinking water, but even with all the rules described it leaves a lot of holes where you would want guarantees instead of 'fix-after-the-fact' rules.

Not sure, IANAL. But for this type of problem (leaking pipe) you'd want metrics on flow and volume on your in, out and transit (or whatever the fluid equivalent is) connections.

I don't know how it's currently done in the USA, but I would have expected utilities to be governed in a way that makes sure they are the first to know when there is a problem and have access to information to solve it. If, for example, you'd see a drop in pressure that doesn't match a trend, or an increased flow, or one of your sensors simply has more data to report, regardless of what data it is, then you know a problem exists. Simply having a tank somewhere and measuring what is in it doesn't even scratch the bare minimum for such an important thing.

Here, we have had a few different methods over the last century, like government-only, public-private combinations with single-vendor tenders, and multiple private companies in different zones to ensure diversity to prevent monoculture problems. But in all of those instances of drinking water governance the rules were for the public/government to decide are always enforced. Those rules are (simplified, there are about 70 super-specific main articles in the law just about residential drinking water):

- definition of what drinking water is (contents, usage)

- definition of what a utility has to do

- definition of how you make drinking water

- definition of how you transport it

- definition of how to measure it

- definition of continuity guarantees

- definition of governing structure of a water company

- definition of task exclusion and production scope

- rules regarding public health

- rules regarding enforcement of the definitions

- rules regarding other rules affecting the water company, supply, demand, transportation

- rules regarding other rules affecting this ruling

The ones that would specifically prevent this are the rules about the governance model, measurement and continuity. They make sure a water utility company has to know what its water is, where it is, when it is, and all of that for the past, present and future. And if you can't follow the rules, you cannot be a water company. By law, those companies are also required to maintain and connect all residents in their zone, which means residents have a guaranteed water supplier.

Seen from an IT perspective, they ran a complex network without enough monitoring. So they didn't detect multiple leaks in time, and ended up wasting a lot (too much) water in dry season.

With enough sensors on the pipelines they could have at least found the leaks in time before all the waste. How practical that is I don't know.

It's completely practical and deployed globally. But knowing there's a leak (akin to "knowing there's a bug") is not enough to find and fix it. And the cost-effectiveness drops to likely negative for a small place.

A few dozen sensors can go a long way, for example a municipality can find that a particular pipe is consistently pushing 100gpm, despite serving residential customers that don't normally have that kind of even usage. This implys a leak on that section of pipe, making a root cause analysis (and shutting off just the worst leaks in the system, rather than the whole town) much easier to do.

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