Third in a four-part series on the Roanoke Valley’s water supply.
Those who object to the data center that Google will soon start building in Botetourt County are concerned about how much water the complex will use.
Data centers are notoriously thirsty — they use the water for cooling — and Google would be, by far, the largest water user in the Roanoke Valley. The Coca-Cola bottling plant in Roanoke is currently the largest customer for the Western Virginia Water Authority, taking 260,000 gallons per day. Google, by contrast, has reserved up to 2 million gallons a day — 7.6 times as much.
This is why we see signs across Botetourt warning that Google will “deplete our water supply.” That’s not quite so, as the data I presented in Tuesday’s column showed: The Roanoke Valley uses less water now than it did 20 years ago and its current water usage is running 36.4% below what the valley was once projected to be using at this point. (Disclosure: We have received a grant from the Google News Initiative to support our expansion in the New River Valley, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.)
We may well want to wonder whether it’s wise for a single user of any sort to take so much water, but Google could drink down all that water and we’d still be using less water than we did two decades ago. The main reasons why water usage has dropped, even as the number of customers has done up: Appliances today are far more water-efficient than they once were.
However, there’s something else in the Roanoke Valley that drinks down more than twice as much water as Google would use, and it draws no public condemnation at all: leaky pipes.
Last year, 7,449,833,000 gallons of water — that’s 7.4 billion, if you prefer — came out of the valley’s multiple water supplies and were run through treatment facilities. That’s the official measure for how much water the authority withdrew from the reservoirs at Carvins Cove, Spring Hollow, Falling Creek and various wells, of which Crystal Spring is the biggest.
On the other end of the water system, 5,422,418,000 gallons — that’s 5.4 billion — flowed past water meters and got billed to customers.
Somewhere between the treatment plants and the tap, some 2,037,415,000 — 2.0 billion gallons — simply disappeared. That’s 27.3% of the water that entered the system.
Where’d it go? Mostly it leaked away.
A relatively small, and unquantifiable, amount went for firefighting and the necessary practice of flushing out hydrants. Most of it, though, just oozed out through cracks, and presumably went back into the earth, and, eventually, the aquifer. Replenishing the aquifer is obviously not a bad thing — it’s a good thing — although that’s not the ideal way to do it. In a more perfect world, we’d only take what we needed and leave the rest where it is.
For context, that water loss is 2.0 billion gallons a year, nearly three times Google’s contracted amount of 2 million gallons per day, which works out to 730 million gallons per year.
For all the leaks we have, we could supply two Google complexes and still have water left over.
Now, before you start blaming the Western Virginia Water Authority for running a leaky system, keep two things in mind.
First, the authority’s water loss is pretty standard nationally. A report last year by Bluefield Research, an international consulting firm that specializes in water data, said that 19.5% of the water in the United States is simply lost, with almost all that being due to leaks. By that measure, the Roanoke Valley’s 27.3% rate is higher than the national average — but hang on, we’ve got more context coming.
The leakage used to be much higher. Twenty years ago, 38% of the valley’s water is listed as “unbilled,” meaning it mostly leaked away. That year 3.2 billion gallons of water simply disappeared from the system somewhere between the source and the spigot. That was also the year that the valley’s water usage was at its height. You can see here how that figure has come down over the years, and as leaks have been fixed, water usage has gone down.
The most recent figures from 2025 that show an uptick in leaks are something of an anomaly. The authority has been making repairs to the Spring Hollow reservoir and shifted more demand to Carvins Cove — and the pipes leading from the cove are among the leakiest in the valley. In 2024, there were 1.56 billion gallons of lost water. The next year, with more reliance on Carvins Cove, the amount of lost water jumped to 2.0 billion gallons even though customer consumption barely changed. Put another way, the shift in water sources saw the valley’s water loss go from 22.6%, fairly close to the national average, to 27.3%.
When the maintenance work is done and the water draws return to a more normal distribution pattern, the amount of lost water should drop — but even 1.56 billion gallons is a lot of water to be lost.
Some places lose a whole lot more. The Associated Press has reported that some Chicago suburbs lose more than 40% of their water through leaks. The Detroit neighborhood of Highland Park loses about 70%. Some poor communities in Georgia lose about 80% of their water.
The culprit is always the same: aging infrastructure that’s expensive to replace. In the Roanoke Valley, the oldest water lines date back to, are you ready for this, 1889, when Benjamin Harrison was president. The authority says these lines are primarily in the “Old Southwest//Gainsboro/Wells Ave/South Roanoke area.”
The authority maintains 1,369 miles of water main pipes and aims to replace or repair some each year. Last year it worked on about 11 miles. This year it’s on track to work on another 11 miles. On a percentage basis, those figures are about the industry average.
In the water world, these leaks are classified as “non-revenue water” because it’s not water being sold to customers. “Non-revenue water is a significant and often overlooked challenge in municipal water management, and in many respects, core infrastructure delivering drinking water is approaching the end of its useful life,” that Bluefield Research report said.
Water lines have the misfortune of literally being out of sight and therefore often out of mind, so a crumbling water supply system doesn’t get the attention of, say, a school with a leaky roof, where the problem is water coming in, not water going out.
Because they’re underground, water leaks are sometimes hard to find. Technicians use gizmos called “acoustic leak correlators” to locate big leaks; they measure sound waves and look for the sound of water leaking. For those who want to know such things, here’s the formula they work on:
Will Bulloss, chief strategy officer for the Western Virginia Water Authority, says that not all leaks can — or should — be fixed. It costs the authority $1,500 per day to send a crew to fix a leaky pipe, so you don’t want to send a $1,500 crew to fix a $1 leak.
While the national average for water leaks is 19.5%, there are places that have gotten their leakage rates much lower. The global leader is Tokyo. It was once losing about 20% of its water to leaks. Many American communities would consider that acceptable. Not Tokyo. It launched an aggressive program of monitoring leaks (that whole acoustic thing) and replacing pipes. Today, its leakage rate is about 3%. The Roanoke Valley could have that rate, too — if people were willing to pay higher water bills or higher taxes to cover the cost.
Until then, the valley essentially has the equivalent of two, close to three, Google data center complexes underground drinking the water away.
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