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Leaky and Broken Pipes are Draining Tax Payers June 18 2009

According to an article “Pipes a Cash Drain” that appeared in the Toronto Sun last week (Brian Gray), leakage rates in water pipes across the province on Ontario range between 10% and 50%.

http://www.torontosun.com/news/torontoandgta/2009/06/11/9759596-sun.html

What does this mean? Well, about 130,000 olympic sized swimming pools.  Ever fill a pool, do you know how long that takes using a garden hose?  It feels like forever.  Well, all that water is probably free flowing below our cities, erroding infrastructure and potentially causing safety issues for our citizens.  Not to mention tax payers money.  Thats right, all that water that is leaking out of our pipes, we are still paying for it!  Tax payers are shelling out to the tune of $1billion annually on perfectly good drinking water that is leaking from our water infrastructure.

So what can we do about it?   Well one solution is to systematically dig up all the pipes and replace them all with brand new state of the art concrete.  However, even if we weren’t in a recession, this would be a massive burden on the tax payers costing billions upon billions of dollars.

A better solution would be to detect where all the leaks are, determine their severity, and patch up the holes.  When your plumbing leaks in your home, do you rush out to the hardware store and buy all new pipe for the entire house?  No.  You find the leak and replace the section of pipe or patch the hole.

Ok, sounds good right?  Lets just find the leaks, and patch up the holes as we have cash in the coffers.  But how do we find the leaks?  Do we need to dig them all up causing downtime to our water service and cause traffic problems for the next 10 years?

Fortunately we have the technology that allows us to inspect all of our pipelines, while they remain in service, without having to dig them all up!  The technology is called The Sahara Pipeline Inspection System from PPIC.  According to the PPIC website:

[Sahara is the] first tool designed for live inspection of large diameter water mains, the Sahara® Pipeline Inspection System remains the most accurate tool available for detecting leaks, pockets of trapped gas, and structural defects in large mains. 

http://www.ppic.com/services/sahara.shtml 

So encourage your cities and counties to inspect their pipelines and stop wasting perfectly good water!

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