SALT LAKE CITY A group of three high school students runs through a field of sprinklers, narrowly dodging bursts of water as they shout out, 137, white head, quarter flow! One of them quickly jots down notes on a spreadsheet, eager to bring it inside and get to the fun part: calculus and auditing.
Doesn t sound like your ideal summer? Then you must not be a water manager intern, where summer fun means traveling to 40 schools around the Canyons School District to track water usage by the hundreds of sprinklers on lawns, curbs and playgrounds.
The program, started by energy engineer Christopher Eppler six years ago, trains high schoolers on how to track and audit water usage for the district. The program has saved upward of 20 million gallons of water each year, with savings accruing annually.
As Utah moves into a historic drought for the summer, student interns in Salt Lake County are finding ways to save millions of gallons of water by auditing sprinkler systems on 341 acres of fields.