San Antonio Water System has seen drastic water loss over the last several years due to an increased number of water main breaks exacerbated by extreme heat and drought. SAWS’ board of trustees unanimously approved a new five-year water conservation plan Tuesday that makes preventing water loss a priority.
Water loss, also called non-revenue water by SAWS, is water lost to leaks and main breaks between water sources and customers’ homes and businesses. SAWS experienced its greatest amount of annual water loss ever last year at more than 21 billion gallons. The municipal water utility also experienced the most main breaks within pipes delivering the city’s water supply ever in 2023 due to the scorching summer heat that led San Antonio to reach 75 triple-digit days last year.
Previously, 2022 had seen the most annual water loss for SAWS ever at more than 19 billion gallons — about 5 billion gallons more than what the Vista Ridge project delivers to San Antonio annually.
“SAWS leadership recognizes that water losses experienced during the past two years are not acceptable,” the plan states.
“You will have [water loss] spikes during a drought period and that’s what we’re seeing,” Donovan Burton, SAWS’ vice president of water resources and governmental relations, told SAWS board members Tuesday. “We’re spending a whole lot of money — particularly coming up with the budget, putting new staff in place, doing a whole lot of main replacements and that sort of thing [to address water loss], so that over a several year period we will drive those numbers down.”
| Year | Total Water Loss in Gallons | Water Loss in GPCD | Water Loss as a Percentage |
| 2023 | 21,285,680,159 | 28 | 23.36% |
| 2022 | 19,429,069,543 | 26 | 22.08% |
| 2021 | 15,184,888,814 | 21 | 18.52% |
| 2020 | 14,621,872,113 | 20 | 17.42% |
| 2019 | 13,398,073,243 | 19 | 16.78% |
| Average | 16,783,916,774 | 23 | 19.63% |
From 2019 to 2023, SAWS spent $68 million in main replacements per year on average, said SAWS President and CEO Robert Puente. He added that this year, SAWS budgeted $99 million for main replacements, and in its 2025 draft budget so far it has budgeted is $129 million for main replacements.
In the next five years, SAWS plans to spend $549 million dollars on main replacement, according to the updated plan. In 2022 and 2023, SAWS created and filled 102 new positions to increase response times for main break repair, the plan also notes. Puente said SAWS plans to add even more new “boots on the ground” positions in upcoming years to help staff get to leaks faster.
“One of the big concerns was the complaints … that someone reported a water leak and SAWS didn’t get to it for a week or 10 days, and that’s because we had a limited amount of crews available to go out and fix that leak,” Puente said. “This will allow us to be much more responsive to those complaints.”
Future strategies outlined in the plan to decrease water loss include: updating and enhancing SAWS existing water loss plan, hiring additional staff, expanding parts of SAWS budget “that support reducing real loss” such as the valve maintenance budget, and launching new studies to help determine realistic loss goals for the near future.
Other priorities outlined in the updated conservation plan include decreasing peak demand during drought, and reducing outdoor water use by customers, said Karen Guz, SAWS vice president of conservation. Guz noted while SAWS aims to decrease its water loss amount, water loss in a large system like SAWS is inevitable.
“We will never get to zero water loss — nobody can,” Guz said. “Even newly constructed infrastructure is not expected to be 100% watertight.”
Trustee David McGee told SAWS staff Tuesday he’d like to see the utility be more transparent about its future goals regarding water loss. While the conservation plan notes how much water SAWS has lost per year, and SAWS staff noted the utility’s daily goal is to keep water loss under 45 gallons per connection, McGee said he wants to see specific gallons per capita per day goals set by SAWS for upcoming years.
Puente said the utility is currently working on a new program to get such metrics to the SAWS board by August. Leading that program is Jeff Haby, SAWS senior vice president of production, who largely led SAWS efforts to help it get inline with the EPA’s 2013 consent decree to update SAWS aging wastewater infrastructure.
SAWS already has a lot of tools in place because of that decree that will make this new program move quickly, Haby said.
“The pieces and parts are there together,” Haby said. “What we’ve done in the consent decree — this is a very complex issue — it involves everything from the condition assessment of our mains, and we’ve been doing that for a number of years now — in fact, we’ve been using AI for a number of years and made our AI tools smarter and smarter.”
The approval of the updated conservation plan comes just weeks after SAWS and the City Council put new drought rules into place that have seen the utility implement its Stage 3 drought restrictions for the first time in its 30-year history.
By state mandate, SAWS must update its water conservation plan every five years.
