Texas · PWS TX1230039 · JEFFERSON County

Nome

What Nome filed with TWDB about the water it produced and the water it billed for, 2019–2024 — and what the filing does and does not let anyone verify.

Non-revenue water, FY2024: 58.5%
Annual value of the filed loss: $57,800
Apparent loss that is a default: 13.9%

Read this page as markdown →

What the filing says

Nome serves 349 retail connections and about 825 people. Because it reports fewer than 3,300 connections, it is on a five-year water loss audit cycle with TWDB.

What the record shows

58.5% non-revenue water in FY2024, higher than 97% of the 908 Texas systems that filed that year.

The figure is improving across the record.

This series is flagged for review. The filed loss percentage has moved an average of 51 points a year, against a Texas median of 4.2, including 81% to 5% between FY2020 and FY2021. The flag is that comparison and nothing more: mean absolute change per year, above the seventy-fifth percentile for this state.

It does not establish what moved. A meter replacement program, a main break, a change of billing system, a corrected prior-year filing and an ordinary reporting error all produce a series that looks like this, and a filed water loss audit does not say which happened. What the flag does say is that the years disagree with each other by more than most of the state's do, so a single year of this series is a weak basis for a decision without the records behind it.

Compliance record

271 violations on EPA's record for this system as of 2026Q2, of which 168 are health-based. 260 resolved, 9 archived, and 2 still open.

Public Notification Violation for NPDWR Violation unaddressed, from August 26, 2016
Public Notification Violation for NPDWR Violation unaddressed, from December 15, 2015

Counted as distinct violations, not as rows: EPA's export carries one row per enforcement action taken against a violation, so a row count would multiply this system's record several times over. A violation here is a breach of a reporting, monitoring or contaminant-level rule as reported to EPA — it is not a measurement of the water, and this site has none.

Source: US EPA, Safe Drinking Water Information System, via the ECHO national download, 2026Q2. How we hold it.

2 filed values that cannot be true.

FY2023 reports a leakage index of 0.08, which would mean less real loss than the unavoidable minimum the same audit computes for this network.
FY2021 reports a leakage index of 0.06, which would mean less real loss than the unavoidable minimum the same audit computes for this network.

Each is reproduced exactly as filed and excluded from every figure computed on this page. A number that contradicts its own audit is a finding about the filing, not a gap in ours.

Water balance, FY2024 · 46.4 MG system input

41%

50%

Billed 19.3 MG Unbilled authorized 3.17 MG Apparent loss 0.69 MG Real loss 23.3 MG

TWDB derives water losses from system input minus authorized consumption, so these parts sum to the whole on every filing. What a filing can get wrong is which of these numbers were measured.

Where these volumes come from

System input 46.4 MG sheet 2024, cell AP313 · converted to million gallons from the unit the filing states
Billed authorized 19.3 MG sheet 2024, cell AU313 · converted to million gallons from the unit the filing states
Unbilled authorized 3.17 MG computed here, not read from a cell
Apparent loss 0.69 MG sheet 2024, cell BL313 · converted to million gallons from the unit the filing states
Real loss 23.3 MG sheet 2024, cell BQ313

From data/archive/twdb/2026-08-11-7270fa7072e5.xlsx (SHA-256 7270fa7072e51e70), retrieved 2026-08-11 from the published source.

Filed history, 2019–2024
Year	NRW	Input (MG)	Recoverable
2024	58.5%	46.4	$57,800
2023	2.7%	40.5	$3,850
2022	42.8%	36.6	$11,500
2021	4.5%	47.3	$1,600
2020	80.5%	48.6	$26,500
2019	35.7%	40.2	$21,600

Balance closure is inapplicable on every filed year above, so the column that repeated it is not shown. TWDB derives water losses from system input minus authorized consumption, so this decomposition holds by construction. This is neither a pass nor a disclosure gap.

How much of this figure was measured

Apparent loss is three components: customer meter inaccuracy, unauthorized consumption, and data handling error. TWDB supplies a default value for the last two when a utility does not measure them, and records which in its export. Across the published record, unauthorized consumption is a default on 95% of filings, data handling error on 30%. The median filing is 14.4% defaulted, and 1,329 filings are more than half. TWDB's own data-validity score averages 68.4 out of 100 on the 9,315 filings using a default, against 70.0 on the 429 using none — so the score does not tell the two apart.

13.9% of Nome's reported apparent loss for FY2024 is a default rather than a measurement. How much of a Texas loss figure is measured sets this out across the whole filed record.

How the loss is valued

Apparent loss is water that reached a customer and was never billed: under-registering meters, data-handling errors, unauthorized use. It is valued here at the retail rate, because water that reached a customer would have sold at that rate. Real loss is valued at variable production cost only, since eliminating a leak saves what it cost to treat and pump the water rather than what it would have sold for. Valuing both at the retail rate is how a loss study produces a number nobody in a finance department believes, and that is the mistake this figure is built to avoid.

This is the value of the loss, not an amount anyone has established is recoverable. How much of it a utility can actually collect depends on which meters are under-registering, which accounts are unbilled, and what a replacement or an audit of those accounts would cost. None of that is in a filed water loss audit, and this page does not claim to know it.

Apparent loss is valued at this utility's own reported retail price of water, and real loss at its own reported variable production cost. Not our estimate, and shown to three significant figures.

Comparable systems

In the same county.

System	Basis for comparison	NRW
Northwest Forest MUD	JEFFERSON County	14.4% FY2017
Cardinal Meadows Improvement District	JEFFERSON County	18.8% FY2023
China	JEFFERSON County	7.7% FY2024
Meeker MWD	JEFFERSON County	32.4% FY2024
Jefferson County WCID 10	JEFFERSON County	27.1% FY2024
Port Neches	JEFFERSON County	24.6% FY2024
Groves	JEFFERSON County	58.9% FY2024
Nederland	JEFFERSON County	32.8% FY2024

Where is it going?

This page values the loss at roughly $57,800 a year. It cannot say which accounts, which zones, or which meters, and it cannot say how much of that value is collectable. Answering either takes your billing history, your meter reads, and your production data reconciled against each other.

Our Water Loss Recovery Snapshot is three weeks, one flat fee, and the deliverable is a ranked list of specific accounts and zones with dollars and a confidence on each.

See what the Snapshot delivers Email us about Nome

TWDB has granted this system a water loss waiver (real loss). TWDB records a waiver against a funded project and the mitigation measures the system committed to instead, not against a water loss audit, so this is not attached to any filing above. Where a system holds more than one grant, this states the loss type of one of them.

Sources and corrections. Every figure above is either filed by the utility or computed from filed figures, and each one says which. If a number here looks wrong, tell us: the error may be in the filing, in our reading of it, or in something the export does not show. Send a correction. We will check it against the source, correct the page where it is wrong, and say what changed.

Texas Water Development Board — historical water loss audit data. Retrieved 2026-08-11 from data/archive/twdb/2026-08-11-7270fa7072e5.xlsx. https://www.twdb.texas.gov/conservation/data/doc/water-loss-data/sources/historical-water-loss-audit-data.xlsx