Hidden Data Stories — Unaccounted for water
As part of our efforts to promote everyday use of open data, we will publish one short data story biweekly based on seemingly inconspicuous datasets to uncover the hidden data stories on Data.gov.sg.
News stories like these often come and go unnoticed. When pipe leaks happen, they cause public inconvenience and large quantities of precious water resource are wasted. Is this loss measurable?
To answer this question, we can start by taking a look at the Unaccounted for water dataset on Data.gov.sg.
According to the International Water Association (IWA) and the World Bank Group, unaccounted water can be broken down into three components:
- Un-billed authorised consumption — (e.g. firefighting, pipeline flushing and other public uses)
- Apparent losses — Commercial loss (e.g. water theft, metering inaccuracies, billing anomalies.
- Real losses — Physical loss during transmission, storage and distribution (e.g. pipe breaks & leaks, storage overflow, house connection leaks)
One interesting fact is that Singapore’s water supply system is 100% metered (from water works to consumers), and illegal connections to the supply are non-existent. Based on this, we can assume that the majority of unaccounted water can be attributed to real losses.
At first glance, it may seem like there isn’t anything interesting about this dataset. There are only 5 data points in total, and there has not been much variation from year to year, with the percentage of unaccounted for water hovering around 5% between 2011 and 2015.
However, based on the results of a sample list of countries collated on Wikipedia (chart below), we find that Singapore tops the list for having the smallest proportion of non-revenue water with respect to the total amount of water produced.
One caveat to this comparison is that while Singapore tops the list as the country with the lowest rate of unaccounted water, there are cities that have scored better such as Tokyo which has a rate of 3.2%, and this shows potential for future improvement.
In conclusion, 6100 km of pipes serve 430 million gallons of water to meet our nation’s daily demands today. We have come a long way in reducing the annual number of pipe leaks from 20 per 100 km pipeline in the 1990s, to below 6 per 100 km in present day. With the rise of predictive data analytics and smart sensor network, there is certainly opportunity for using technology to improve the management of this precious resource.
