Water System is Extremely Reliable

Statistics show that El Paso’s water distribution system is extremely reliable. In fact, the number of water line breaks is decreasing, despite an increase in the size of the system.

Chief Operations Officer Dave Brosman attributes this to a successful line replacement program. He says the goal is 99.99 percent reliability, and El Paso Water Utilities consistently meets the goal.

Brosman says the utility tracks the number of service connections affected by each outage and the number of hours that pass before the service is restored. These two numbers are used to calculate the number of customer hours down.

The number of customer hours down is compared to the total number customer hours served to determine system reliability.

“This past year it was 99.9965 percent,” says Brosman, “which meets the target goal of 99.99 percent. We’ve consistently done that since 2002. And we’re four or five times better than the national average as far as the number of miles of line per break.”

He points to two surveys. A 1994 American Water Works Association nationwide study shows 3.3 miles of pipe per line break. The Awwa Research Foundation surveyed cities serving more than 100,000 people in 2007 and found they averaged four miles of pipe per line break.

Brosman compares the AWWA and AwwaRF numbers to El Paso’s numbers, which he says have been in the 15- to 21-mile range in recent years.

“We have a lot of infrastructure in the ground,” says President and CEO Ed Archuleta. “From time to time, because of age and other factors, they’re going to break.

“But we have a tremendous reliability on a percentage basis. When you look at the data, we don’t see any trend going the other way.”