Unlike Salt Lake City, Denver Water has an advanced leak-detection system that uses devices known as "permalogs," which constantly check and report back electronically when leaks are detected.

"We were very low last year," Mcguire-Collier said. "We think it's the permalogs."

Mark Stanley, operations and maintenance director for the department, told auditors that since Salt Lake City adopted its blue-stake program, which marks underground water lines, workers also have lacked the time to proactively go out and search for leaks.

"We used to have a leak-detection crew and then we discontinued that when we went to blue-stake process," Lewis said.

Still, since the city's water-loss rate is lower than the national average, Lewis said there has been no clamor to reinstate the leak-detection crew.

"If we had water loss up above the national average then it would be to our advantage to hire a crew to do that," Lewis said.

Cost is also a factor.

The department looks at the price of tearing up concrete to fix each leak and decides against fixing leaks that prove too expensive, public utilities director LeRoy Hooton Jr. said in the audit.

"It wasn't cost effective to fix the small leaks due to tearing up the road," auditors wrote.

Another factor, according to Hooton, is that contractors will sometimes neglect to pinch off water connections that are no longer connected to anything.

For instance, a developer may take over an area that used to contain 20 houses with 20 residential water connections. The houses would be torn down and replaced with a strip mall.

By code, the contractor would be required to seal off those 20 connections, but some developers don't take that step and instead leave water flowing to the empty connection. That water, then, flows into the ground.

"Commercial areas with re development (like 400 South) may have abandoned lines that haven't been killed," Nick Kryger, Salt Lake City's Geographic Information Systems manager, told the auditors.

Some public-utilities em ployees say the department is too lenient when contractors don't follow the law.

"Salt Lake City is seen as easy on contractors," Sybilla Dalton, public services customer service manager, said. Despite problems, Lewis said the audit shows Salt Lake City is doing a good job preserving as much water as it can within the system. The bottom line, he said, is that any system will lose copious amounts of water.

"We don't have enough manpower or enough money to fix all the leaks in the system."

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E-mail: bsnyder@desnews.com