In 2024, the Municipality of Vila Nova de Famalicão recorded a historic 11 per cent reduction in unbilled water, and has now reached its lowest ever figure - 36 per cent.
The Mayor, Mário Passos, announced the numbers this morning during another meeting of the municipal executive.
It should be remembered that unbilled water means all water that, after being collected, treated, transported, stored and distributed, is not billed.
This includes unbilled authorised consumption - recorded in schools, sports complexes, municipal swimming pools, firefighting, among others - but also real losses, related above all to the ageing of the water distribution infrastructure network, and commercial losses arising, for example, from the existence of an ageing meter fleet.
According to the Mayor, Mário Passos, the mark achieved is the result of the efforts the municipality has been making to combat water wastage in the public network, with the application of measures that have proved successful. ‘These are numbers that give us confidence in the work we're doing, but they still don't satisfy us,’ he said.
Replacing pipelines, repairing defects in the design of the network itself, reducing pressure in the network, creating monitoring and control zones, replacing more than 20,000 ageing meters and monitoring illicit consumption and clandestine sewerage connections are some of the measures adopted by the municipality to combat water losses.
‘Small interventions that have resulted in this large number,’ said Environment Councillor Hélder Pereira, who assured that “the municipality will continue to work to reduce this figure, which represents a financial loss, but above all an environmental loss”. The aim, he explained, is for this figure to stand at 29 per cent in 2025, falling to 19 per cent in 2026 and 14 per cent in 2027.
Famalicão's water supply and sewerage system is supplied by Águas do Norte.
