When water goes missing, who you gonna call?

Perhaps 5 percent of unaccounted-for water can be blamed on slow water meters, fire-hydrant testing, and firefighting. The vast majority of water loss – sometimes more than half of a district's total flow – is tied to undetected breaks that can trickle or gush for years. Revenue losses from that missing water, in turn, can hamper districts' ability to patch pipes.

The problem can be daunting, says Bill Thompson, general manager for the rural White House Utility District in White House, Tenn., which distributes drinking water across 640 square miles. A class action lawsuit against the manufacturers of polybutylene pipe, an inexpensive option popular in the 1980s and '90s, yielded a $950 million settlement, though manufacturers never admitted fault. Expected to last 30 years, the pipes, Mr. Thompson says, turn brittle and fail sometimes after only 10 years. What's more, federal and state dollars usually go toward making sure water is potable, not to maintaining infrastructure or leak detection.

"If you're going to tell all these municipalities to fix their leaks, you've got to provide the cash to do that," says Janet Ward of Atlanta's Department of Watershed Management. "A lot of Southern states are cutting taxes willy-nilly, so there's no revenues to put into this."

In times of shortage, water districts that opt to impose water-use restrictions may find it embarrassing to admit that they are losing millions of gallons. Drought-stricken Atlanta, for instance, loses at least 12 percent of its water every day. In Nashville, officials estimate that 677 million gallons, of a total 2.67 billion, disappear each month. Even in the midst of watering restrictions, Mount Pleasant, Tenn., still can't account for about half its water.

"Between 60 to 70 percent of leaks are not only hidden, but the utility doesn't know anything about them," says Bud Reed, the Gallatin, Tenn.-based sales manager for Flow Metrix, a supplier of acoustic leak-detection equipment.

Of course, no water system is perfectly tight. The closest may be Key West, Fla., where limited supplies of fresh water mean leak detection is a top priority. The fact is, only 1 percent of utility districts actually check for hidden leaks.

That's changed here in Morrow, where a business-minded chairman of the water utility board started asking questions six years ago about the water that went missing every day. A small crew was assembled, a van was bought, and a crack water-detective agency was born.

Inspecting pipe 500 feet at a time, the detectives locate the high-pitched whine of underground leaks using a kind of pipe sonar, computer software, and headphones. Now that Georgia is demanding more accountability from water districts, other counties are hiring the crew as consultants to crack their missing-water cases.

In six years, the crew found 352 leaks across 1,350 miles of pipe, saving Clayton County $12 million worth of water. Even as the county population spurted over the past six years, actual annual water production here dropped by nearly 1 billion gallons.

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