High Tech Used To Locate Fairfax Water Leak

A location of a leak had been plagueing Randy Devine for some time as thousands of gallons of water a day were being lost. This is when Randy called for help from the big guns who had the technical know-how to find the leak. The town of Fairfax belongs to a Rural Water Resource Group and pays dues of $225 a year. Among the things it does is help out in situations like this at no cost other than the dues to the town.

I asked Randy if he could explain to me just how they found the leak and I will now try to explain what Randy told me.

Randy had pinpointed it to between two shutoffs on the Fletcher Road, but needed it pinpointed further so they wouldn't have to dig up for hundreds of feet. He told me that this guy came and dropped a couple of cylinder type items down on each one of the shutoffs. He said that when they dropped them down, they magnetized themselves to the top of the shutoffs. These loggers as they are called were then attached to a laptop computer which then took a little time to chug and churn out its calculations.

Now the big question, where was the leak. The guy asked how many feet from the first shutoff the first leak was and the computer came back and gave him the answer to which they measured out the distance and marked it. He then asked how far the leak was from the second shut off and they measured and marked that. That is when Pat Pigeon started digging.

The measurement was within one foot of where the actual leak was. There was no way of seeing the leak from the top of the ground as due to the extremely sandy soil, the water was all being absorbed into the ground.

What a long ways we have come over the years since this system was put in many years ago. There are a lot more details to this than what I have in this note, but it does give you a general idea of some of the technology available today.