The angel’s share is the portion of a batch of whiskey that evaporates when the whiskey is aged in wooden barrels. Up to one percent of a batch of can be lost each year this way. That is a cost of doing business that whiskey producers factor in when they do their planning.
The angels have been snockered since the Scots invented distilling a thousand years ago.
When you run a park with public water, you pay the town for water at the curb. All water that passes through the master meter, which measures water entering the park’s water mains from the municipal mains, is your responsibility. You can bill residents for their individual usage, but any water that leaks out of the mains between the master meter and the individual meters is a loss. That water is the angel’s share.
Like friction, entropy, market inefficiencies and lacrosse players, you can minimize leakage but you can’t eliminate it. I understand that until recently, older American cities, like New York, Philadelphia and Boston, still had sections of water main made out of wooden pipes. Those leaked like, well, blocks of wood. Israeli water system operators tend to be better at minimizing leaks than most. Their infrastructure is new, water is a precious resource in the desert, and they are quick to adopt new detection and analytic technologies.
Q: Why do Israeli women like their water operators circumcised?
A: Because they can’t resist anything with 10% off.
At both my parks, we track water usage using meters made by a company called Metron-Farnier. Metron meters provide real-time water usage information accessible from a web-based portal in a format that can be put into a spreadsheet or a pie-chart. Since there is a master meter at the point where water enters the park mains from city mains as well as a meter at each individual resident’s home, it allows us to track the angel’s share.
The problem with Metron meters is that they are temperamental. Sand gets stuck in the paddles of the individual meters. Antennas can be mercurial. Some meters run backwards. Like a bunch of sub-terranean Ferraris, they work exceptionally well when they work. When they are on the fritz, not so much. Nevertheless, on the whole, Metron meters are worth it.
I bought Metron meters because they are endorsed by Frank and Dave. I do not know whether Frank and Dave receive a kickback from Metron for discussing their meters on their blog. I do not receive any compensation from Metron for discussing their meters here, although readers who have connections at the company are encouraged to contact them to let them know that I would be more than happy to receive a little something to offset this month’s boat payment.
Here is a screenshot of water usage at my park in northern New York the week before last:
The green-shaded area is water consumed, i.e. water measured by individual meters. The blue-shaded area is water used, or water measured by the master meter. Any blue space not covered by green space is the angel’s share. That is water that entered the park mains but did not make it to individual residents’ toilets, showers and sinks, because it is irrigating the ground below the park.
By eyeballing the graph, you can see that a leak developed some time in the morning of 8/24 and got worse on 8/26. If you squint, you can see that water consumed, i.e. the green-shaded area, decreased when water used increased. That is because, when water started leaking into the ground, residents’ water pressure decreased. They couldn’t use as much as they had been using before the leak developed because there wasn’t as much water available to use.
I stayed in the park that week. The manager, Mike, was on his first vacation in five years. I camped out in one of the two new TRU homes that I recently bought and had installed in that park. Other than one whack-job who did not like me walking through his yard, my stay was fun. It was quiet, safe and pleasant, and I enjoyed passing the time with my neighbors. I did burpee and kettlebell workouts on the driveway in front of the office in the mornings. I practiced using the excavator attachment on the backhoe. When I found out that one of the residents has a daughter who wants to become a lawyer, I coached her on how to get into law school. Smoking my own inventory made me feel like less of a slumlord.
I left the morning of 8/24, just when the leak developed. A day after I came home, my phone farted. When I picked it up, my next-door neighbor in the park was on the line. ‘Are you still here, or is Mike back’, he asked me.
-Mike is back today.
-Well, I don’t have any water pressure.
-I know that we have a leak. Mike is looking into it.
I texted the circuit rider at the New York Rural Water Association assigned to our area and asked him if he could help locate the leak. He told me that he was backed up until late September. I said that the leak would not wait until then. He suggested that I contact a private leak-detection service if this was a rush job. I chewed on the leather straps restraining me and reminded the circuit rider that I was a member of the NYRWA, that I had joined so that I could access this service, and that I did not see the use of paying twice for the same service. I asked again, nicely, and he agreed to come out on Monday of the past week.[1]
When the circuit rider came out on Monday, he and Mike listened to the lines and determined that the leak was on a line that led from a point behind the park office to a T that joins lot 23A to lot 22A, a run of about a hundred yards. That line is galvanized and looks like this:
When Mike called me to discuss, he said, ‘I can start digging holes in the ground looking for the leak, or I can just replace the whole run’. I asked,
-Does the rest of the run look like that?
-As far as I know, yes.
-Then, replace the whole run.
The next day, my phone farted and Mike said, ‘Do you want the shitty news or the really shitty news?’
-Surprise me.
-The shitty news is that the health department is here. Some people complained. We have to let them get drinking water from the pump house by C section.
That park is divided into three sections, A, B and C. Everyone refers to the ‘C section’ without irony. I still can’t say that with a straight face. I said, ‘What’s the really shitty news?’
-The backhoe blew a cylinder. I don’t have an excavator.
-So, what can you do?
-I can install the pipe above ground for now, just so people have water.
-Do that.
The really, really shitty news was that, after Mike hooked up the new run of pipe, water used did not decrease significantly. He had replaced a grotty run of pipe that was an accident waiting to happen, but he had not solved the problem. He sounded exhausted and angry when he called me to give me that news. ‘Can we get the circuit rider to come out again?’, he asked me. I said,
-I don’t think so. I had to beg to get him to come this time.
-That’s bullshit! That’s politics!
-Its limited resources. We are not the only water system in the state. I kind of understand.
-Can we call a private leak detection company?
-They won’t do dick.
So, Mike did some empirical research. He turned off curb stops, asked who lost water and who gained pressure. By doing that, he was able to narrow down the location of the leak to a two hundred foot stretch. He started digging holes near a damp spot. After some time, he found this:
Readers are encouraged to write in to tell me what the bloody hell that is. The water main goes from Point A to Point B four feet below the ground, below the frost line. It then rises to a point approximately two feet above the frost line, forms a loop, and descends to point C, at the same depth as Point B and not far from Point B, and then extends in the direction it would have extended had it not take that detour. The loop does not feed anything or serve any observable purpose.
The fittings in the loop leaked:
In tort law, an employer can be held liable if an employee commits a tort in the course of the employer’s business, even if the tort occurs while the employee makes a detour. However, an employer cannot be held liable if the employee makes a frolic. For example, if an Amazon driver runs over a cat while he is pulling off the road to relieve his bladder, Amazon can be held liable for the driver’s actions because that is a detour. It is minimal, limited, and reasonably anticipated. If, however, the driver deviates from his route to shoot crank, gamble in Atlantic City and whistle suggestively at old ladies, that is a frolic.
Distinguishing between a frolic and a detour is like the telling the difference between night and day. Easy cases are no-brainers but reasonable people can disagree about marginal cases. The instant case is not marginal. Transposed to piping, a minor deviation to get a pipe around a boulder or another utility line is a detour. A gratuitous loop above the frostline is a frolic.
When Mike sent me the picture of the frolic, I asked, ‘What the bloody hell is that for?’
-Fuck if I know.
-You know who put it there?
-No, but they insulated it. They knew it could freeze.
When I sat down to write this post, I thought that Euclid said that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Some googling showed that I was wrong, and that, in fact, Archimedes said that. The two men were not the same, but they were similar. One was a scientist, the other was a mathematician. One lived in north Africa, the other in Magna Graecia. Both lived around the third century B.C.E. Both had day jobs in diners. Either or both would have had the common sense to see that this is the thing to do with a water main frolic:
On October 3, NYRWA will run an education program about leak detection in Olean. Olean is to New York what Tristan da Cunha is to, well, everywhere, but I plan to attend. Maybe I can visit Saint Bonaventure’s, or buy some Cutco or K-Bar knives while I am there. The next infrastructure project for the park in northern New York is to map sub-surface lines and to bring leak detection in-house. I would like to speak with people who understand the process before I sink twelve grand into equipment to do that. After all, I am a greedy bastard. I want to cut off the angels.
[1] I am hesitant to call private leak detection companies. Shortly after I bought that park, I hired a leak detection company based in Syracuse to listen to the lines. They spent half a day doing what NYRWA does and charged me $1,500. That money would have been better spent had it been donated to the Lyndon Larouche presidential campaign fund.