I work on chillers and if the cooling towers float valve isn’t adjusted right and it’s constantly pushing water out for a year without someone catching it, you would loose potentially 500,000 gallons a year or more, and that’s just one part. Granted it goes back into the city’s system but that’s our clean water that has to go into a treatment system taking time and resources. Every place is different but here in Arizona I would assume they use a similar commercial setup. The water to the building from the plant is a closed loop but that’s harder for the cooling towers to the chillers since it’s evaporative, which you don’t loose a lot of water but that’s assuming that everything is in working order and well maintained, and a lot of commercial facilities are cheap on maintenance and don’t like to fix things until it becomes a big issue. To be fair I think industrial only takes up 6% of water use but it’s still precious here.
I remember a kid in our class grabbed a fork from lunch, then proceeded to wrap his hand with a sweatshirt when we’re in class and then stabbed the outlet causing our room and a couple of classrooms to loose power. I think they thought it just happened randomly since the sub didn’t notice plus the lights went off so you couldn’t see him stabbing the outlet. Our class got yelled at for being too loud since they were screaming when the lights went off, but the kid that did that never got caught.