Last week I received my water bill. City West Water always send some interesting material with our usual bills. Their own reported figures show that they are very good at fixing water problems quickly. One of the more interesting figures on their fact sheet is the unaccounted water percentage. 10.1% of Melbourne’s water supply seems to be unaccounted for. Is this a normal figure? Surely it isn’t common to have huge water main breaks such as today’s incident on Lonsdale Street?
Wikipedia reports unaccounted water or non-revenue water as water that is lost due to leaks or metering inaccuracies. While I thought 10% was big, China is an appalling 52%. While it’s easy to criticize Victoria’s lack of forward thinking with it’s dams and desalination plant, at least we have good water infrastructure in place to retain most of our water.