Sky Eyes, Soggy Pipes: New Mexico Gets Serious About Water Loss

New Mexico taps satellite AI to find underground leaks draining up to 70 percent of treated water from rural systems

7 Apr 2026

In some corners of New Mexico, nearly three-quarters of treated water never reaches a customer. It seeps silently into desert soil through cracked and aging pipes, unseen and unmeasured until the bill arrives or the well runs low. For small utilities with thin budgets, locating such leaks has long been a matter of guesswork and patience.

That may be changing. The New Mexico Environment Department has awarded ASTERRA, a satellite data company, a four-year statewide contract to expand a programme called LeakTracer, which uses L-band satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to detect underground leaks that standard inspection tools routinely miss. Field verification is handled by McKim & Creed, giving utilities a path from detection to repair without assembling the expertise themselves.

The pilot results were striking. Across five utilities surveyed through May 2025, the programme identified more than 78 confirmed leaks and cut network losses by 240 gallons per minute. In Truth or Consequences, a town whose name now carries unintentional resonance, 31 leaks were located in two days. Conventional surveys, by comparison, might take weeks and still miss half of them. Estimated daily savings reached 345,000 gallons.

Cost has historically been the sticking point. Rural operators serving fewer than 20,000 connections can access the satellite detection at no charge under the new contract, paying only once a leak is confirmed and repaired. The model shifts risk away from cash-strapped utilities and toward a technology provider confident enough in its data to defer payment.

The contract is framed as a plank in New Mexico's 50-Year Water Action Plan, an ambitious document that confronts the arithmetic of a warming, drying Southwest. Recovering hundreds of thousands of gallons daily from failing infrastructure is genuinely useful. Yet satellites can only find what is already broken. Whether the state's rural utilities have the workforce, funding, and materials to repair leaks at the pace the technology can reveal them is a separate, earthbound question the plan does not yet answer.