As Texas’s population booms and the state grows hotter and drier, it’s more important than ever to understand: Who’s wasting our water?
Every day buried pipes across Texas spill water into the soil, through breaks large and small. Roadwork and digging to lay fiber-optic cable often damage water mains. Extreme temperatures can shift the ground, creating fractures in decades-old lines. Some crack simply because they’ve met the end of their useful life—typically 50 to 75 years.
Enough water seeps from these broken pipes each year to meet the needs of Austin, El Paso, Fort Worth, Laredo, and Lubbock combined. It’s more than enough—186 billion gallons—to put Dallas County under a foot of H₂O.
Texas should invest in repairing leaky pipes and replacing aging ones before paying for new sources of water, argues Hidden Reservoirs: Addressing Water Loss in Texas, a 2022 report from the Texas Living Waters Project, a collaboration of several environmental nonprofits. The authors extrapolated statewide annual water loss from a sample of cities, using data that utilities report in mandatory audits.
