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Water Use Patterns in a Small Southern Oklahoma City During Drought and Implications for Leaking Underground Storage Tanks
Citation:
Weaver, Jim. Water Use Patterns in a Small Southern Oklahoma City During Drought and Implications for Leaking Underground Storage Tanks. Presented at Society for Freshwater Science Annual Meeting, Raleigh, North Carolina, June 04 - 08, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
The City of Ada Oklahoma obtains water from the Simpson-Arbuckle aquifer located 19 km south of town. During winter the typical water demand is approximately 15,000 m3 per day, while during the drought of 2011 demand more than doubled. In order to understand water use patterns, customer billing records and property data were analyzed, using the county-assessor market value of residences as a primary metric. Within each category of market value, a small number of residences used more water than average causing each distribution to skew. Water use increased consistently with market value, but when taken in total, residences in the lowest market value category used the most water (because of their large number). The data indicate sensitivity to price indirectly through customer response and directly where price differentials were identified. In a validation example, the data were able to predict cold and hot season water use in a neighborhood defined by market value. An unexplained feature of the data was the almost exact correspondence between residential and commercial use. Various commercial water users significantly increased water use in hot season apparently due to outside water use. Leaking underground storage tanks may impact private wells, the water use rates provide a means to estimate the impacts of ground water pumping on private domestic wells. Analysis of wells and tanks in Oklahoma show estimate that there could be as many as 45 private domestic wells in the expected area of a leaking tank.
Description:
The City of Ada Oklahoma obtains water from the Simpson-Arbuckle aquifer located 19 km south of town. During winter the typical water demand is approximately 15,000 m3 per day, while during the drought of 2011 demand more than doubled. In order to understand water use patterns, customer billing records and property data were analyzed, using the county-assessor market value of residences as a primary metric. Within each category of market value, a small number of residences used more water than average causing each distribution to skew. Water use increased consistently with market value, but when taken in total, residences in the lowest market value category used the most water (because of their large number). The data indicate sensitivity to price indirectly through customer response and directly where price differentials were identified. In a validation example, the data were able to predict cold and hot season water use in a neighborhood defined by market value. An unexplained feature of the data was the almost exact correspondence between residential and commercial use. Various commercial water users significantly increased water use in hot season apparently due to outside water use. Leaking underground storage tanks may impact private wells, the water use rates provide a means to estimate the impacts of ground water pumping on private domestic wells. Analysis of wells and tanks in Oklahoma show estimate that there could be as many as 45 private domestic wells in the expected area of a leaking tank.