A 1,842-foot-deep well provided water to Benton County Water District #1 in Avoca, Ark., until 2000, when the Benton/Washington Regional Public Water Authority built a water treatment plant.
"When our transmission mains were installed in 1974, the well had no meter," says manager Eddie Cooper. "Once we began purchasing water from the plant, we realized some loss, but it wasn't too bad." That ultimately changed. By 2006, non-revenue water averaged 26 percent or 42.5 million gallons.
Since then, a leak detection and repair program has helped cut nonrevenue water by a total of about
