Chatham County, NC Water Use Rules: Leak Reporting Duty (2026)

01(B)(5) requires that water leaks on the property or facilities of a county water customer be repaired within ten days of discovery. The requirement sits inside the county's year-round water conservation measures, adopted to protect the Jordan Lake water supply and avoid costly expansion of treatment and storage capacity. The same section separately lists water lost through plumbing leaks that can be readily identified and corrected among the non-beneficial, wasteful uses the ordinance prohibits, so a leak a customer knows about and lets run counts as a violation independent of the ten-day repair clock.

The duty applies to leaks on the customer's own property or on facilities the customer controls; it does not excuse the county from maintaining the water mains and meters it owns. Because the leak-repair duty is part of Chapter 51's year-round measures, it applies at all times, not only during a declared drought stage under the county's separate water-shortage response, and it applies to every customer served by the county water system in the unincorporated area, without regard to which irrigation sub-area or watering-day schedule the property falls under.