A sudden increase in a water bill is not unordinary. It often does not raise any red flags, but it is noticed when it happens to a nonprofit.

When Jana Riley, executive director of the Public Works Art Center in Summerville, received the building’s monthly water bill this past December, she immediately noticed something needed addressing.

“I knew there had to be a leak,” Riley said. “We got a water bill for over $300; typically, our water bill is around $50 monthly. The Summerville Commissioners of Public Works (CPW) office also called us in January to tell us they noticed unusually high water usage in our space. We are in the former water company building but aren’t affiliated with them.”

Riley said plumbers were called in because there were no visible leaks in the building and no soft ground outside.

“The plumbers worked for an entire day, maybe even two days, just turning off valves, trying to isolate the leak, looking at the water meter, seeing if it was still spinning; it was just quickly pouring out from somewhere,” Riley said. “It was clear that there was a definite leak, but we just could not find it.”

The building also has a groundwater pump because it has a basement. The pump is designed to pump water from the ground into the street. Riley said the pump worked so hard that it broke and overflowed.

“We knew there was water pouring into the ground somewhere, but we couldn’t find where it was,” she said. “The plumbers couldn’t figure it out, either.”

Then, help arrived from the unlikeliest of sources: a rescue dog named Agua Fuga.

Agua Fuga, Spanish for “water leak,” is a 4-year-old Labrador Retriever/Chow Chow mix who works with Berkeley County Water and Sanitation (BCWS). She was donated to Berkeley County in October 2020. She has been trained to help BCWS staff detect water leaks in service lines and water mains.

Agua Fuga trained with Lowcountry Dog Training to learn to detect water leaks, mainly by following the smell of chlorine. Since the training, she has detected several service line leaks across Berkeley County and neighboring municipalities with her owner and BCWS water distribution technician, Tim McKnight.

Summerville CPW Executive Assistant Patty Walton said former BCWS director Doug Tompkins heard of a leak-detection dog at a utility in Arizona and another one in England and made it his mission to get one, mentioning it frequently at the Lake Moultrie Water Agency meetings.

“He always wanted one,” Walton said. “But they cost a lot of money, so finally getting one without paying nearly $20,000 was really a big deal. She has saved them a lot of money and saved the Public Works Art Center a lot of money in this instance. It’s really amazing what she does. She can smell leaks 10 to 15 feet underground.”

Riley said she called Chris Kahler at the CPW and asked what he would do. He told Riley that leak detection specialists are expensive.

“At the end of the phone call, right before we were hanging up, he said, ‘You know, I have a crazy idea. Let me make a couple of calls.’ I asked him what he was talking about, and he said, ‘There might be a dog,’ and he hung up the phone.”

Kahler got Riley and Walton in touch with each other, and Walton told her about Agua Fuga.

“We were willing to try anything, and we’re nonprofit, so if we could get this taken care of at little to no cost, that’s even better. I think that one of the coolest parts of the story is you have the CPW that serves the public with water needs, and you have us as a nonprofit in this building that they once owned,” Riley said. “We didn’t have the money for a leak detection specialist, and the CPW knows that. So, this was a very unconventional way of fixing this leak.”

McKnight brought Agua Fuga to the Public Works Art Center a couple of days later. The two walked around outside the building a few times, Riley said, and Agua Fuga kept alerting to a particular spot. About 10 minutes after she arrived, Agua Fuga found the leak.

“It was an irrigation leak in that area, but it was well below the ground where we had been looking,” Riley said. “Our January water bill was over $400, too, because it took about a month to figure out the problem. But once that dog came, we isolated the problem and got the water to stop leaking. Our February bill was $42.”