The Park City Council approved a Request for Proposal this spring to check the 120-plus miles of water pipes in Park City. The study discovered about 110 gallons of water is being lost -- per minute. City staff will be going back before council to get approval for a system that will detect future leaks around year round. Melissa Allison has more:
In 2017 Park City lost 820 gallons of water per minute due to 53 leaking hydrants, one mainline leak, three leaking valves and one temporary irrigation system that is still running.
These leaks cost the city nearly $55,000 dollars in materials and the energy expended to treat it. But that doesn’t speak to the value of water lost in the high desert of Park City.
Those leaks are in the process of being repaired and field staff will regularly monitor the hydrants using equipment the city already has, during routine maintenance and after repairs.
But staff has been looking at how to prevent that kind of loss in the future, especially since some of the pipeline in town is 60 years old and is covered in soil that is notorious for its corrosive nature.
In addition to the acoustic leak system, staff engaged a different company to monitor the pipes in upper Deer Valley.
Water Resource Manager Jason Christensen said there may be some leaks up there as well.
“We hired a consultant by the name of Visinti and they’ve installed about 20 sensors on fire hydrants in the upper Deer Valley area," Christnesen said. "And those sensors are basically listening all the time to the pipes. So the acoustic leaking detection that we did earlier, that was someone listening for a few seconds. These sensors are listening 24/7 and actually transmitting that data back to us where it’s being analyzed. And through that effort we actually have a change order that we’re going to present to council in the next couple of weeks.”
They’ve already detected about seven leaks and a preliminary estimate indicates the city is losing about 100 gallons per minute of water from those sources and that’s just the ones they know of.
The contract for the acoustic leak detection, which included three weeks of people monitoring the pipes, was almost $42.000.
The contract with the Visenti firm is for $56,600. It would provide services for a six month trial period. If the city likes the service they’ll have to invest another $25,000 to purchase the equipment and software outright, with an additional monthly service charge of more than $2,200 to monitor and analyze the data.
Christensen said the price of not repairing the leaks will cost the community even more.
“That’s about $50,000 a year in utility, plus a couple in utilities, plus a couple consumables," Christensen said. "So that’s the cost of the electricity to pump it up there, some of the chlorine that gets put in there and some of the other additives in that water. So it’s mainly just electricity, honestly, that embedded energy again.”
Christensen said the contract will pay for itself in time.
“We’re really seeing a lot of benefit to focusing on these leaks right now and seeing what we can do to find the leaks that aren’t surfacing," Christensen said. "Because with a $50,000 reduction in operating cost – that’s a real savings and that pays for the Visenti contract; that pays for the repair. In a year or to two, maybe three on the high end and after that – that’s money we’re saving the community.”
Christnesen hopes to go before council with this information at Thursday’s meeting. But if not, it will be before the council on July 19.
I’m Melissa Allison, KPCW News.