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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.

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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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