Audits show leaks cause significant water loss in almost half of towns

Almost half of the 100 municipalities that have performed checks on their water pipes in recent months have found that they lose more than 20% of the water that enters the network due to leaks, broken pipes, tank overflows and other such issues.

This is one of the main takeaways from an analysis made by the Catalan News Agency (ACN) of the municipal audits, which are mandatory for water supply entities in services with more than 5,000 subscribers.

The tests show that Amposta and Alcanar are the towns that lose the most water, with 60% and 56% of the total that enters the network.

Both councils believe they will be able to reverse the losses by recontracting the maintenance services. 

The mayor of Amposta, Adam Tomàs, defended his municipal council, pointing out to the Catalan News Agency that they have been working for a decade to stop these water losses. Tomàs explained that the leaks have "stabilized." "

"When we build a road, we change all of the water infrastructure," Tomàs said. "We install rainwater deposits, we change the pipes, replace the lead pipes. We have found a lot of lead and fibre cement pipes which are completely deficient, in a really bad state, leading to a lot of water losses, and we change out the sewers."

The mayor added that the work to fix such damaged infrastructure is very expensive for the council to carry out, and called for aid for municipalities to stop the leaks.

According to data from the Catalan Water Agency (ACA), 133 municipalities had to publish the results of the studies before March 31, 2024. At the moment, 12 still have not done so.

101 municipalities have published the document, as well as 17 more that are also obliged to do so with additional aggregated data from Aigües de Barcelona, and 15 more towns have also published the data despite not being obliged to do so.

The audits show that in 61 of the 133 cases, more than 20% of the total water introduced into the network is being lost due to leaks and problems with the pipes.

The average loss for all towns is 22%, while the 17 municipalities that depend on Agbar, such as Barcelona, ​​Badalona l'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Sant Feliu de Llobregat or Castelldefels, are 7.7% of the water introduced into the system.