Originally published at: A prison in Texas accidentally drained the entire water supply of a nearby town | Boing Boing
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… oopsy doopsy 
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Hmm, if the break happened on their property, it means that the leak was metered. (The water meter is normally at the property line.) So the leak will be charged to the prison, via their utility bill, right? Right?
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They will just forward it to the state where tax payers will foot the bill.
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If only they had a facility nearby where they could incarcerate those guilty of draining the town’s entire water supply.
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but not before 200,000 gallons of water were siphoned off from the local water source that serves the nearby town of Venus, Texas.
“We found out Monday morning [that] they let it go all weekend, just running. And doing that with the amount of water that we had that main water tower — they drained it,” he said. “They’ve got a ton of water all over the ground.”
That’s much closer to 835 tons of water. I’ve had the main line to my house leak once. It probably didn’t run much more than a day that we noticed, but could have started leaking several days before that. It was a kink in the copper supply line from a root. I excavated it myself, by hand, and had a plumbing company come out and fix it. I don’t remember the exact amount of water that we were charged for, but I know our bill was about 8x higher than normal.
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Next time that happens, talk to the city and ask about getting a reduction in your bill. The cost of fresh water is usually only about 1/3 to 1/2 of the billed amount, and the rest pays for sewer treatment of that water. If you can show them evidence that the water didn’t go down the drain, and if you’re polite, reasonable, and not demanding, sometimes they’ll cut you a break.
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What a remarkably helpful comment!
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Apparently it happens enough that our city has an official form for such issues. They did reduce the bill a bit over half, which was helpful. Our house at the time was built in 1910. I doubt the copper line was that old, but certainly more than 50 years I’d guess. The hardest part was digging down to the line in the hot dry part of summer. The ground was like a rock.
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ISWYDT.
Can confirm; we had a rusted out pipe that took 2 weeks to dig up and repair. I sent a copy of the repair bill to our county water dept. and they knocked half off of our bill.
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Is this one of those prisons that they use to add more population-weight to a Republican-voting district?
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Not sure, but the geographical location fits.
I hope none of the inmates dies for this. It’s dangerously hot and any dehydration is going to make that even more dangerous
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Management and Training Corporation
Are they going for extra Dystopian points?
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You don’t sound Jaded at all! You sound positively engaged!
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Especially since Texas prisons generally aren’t air-conditioned.
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