Atrios linked a NYT story about a broken underground aquifier which supplies New York. Since the 1980s it is known that the aquifier has at least two big leaks and the city only now start to look into repair options.
While researching a bit around this I found a press release of the NYC environmental protection department about the aquifer repair. It claims:
New York City’s water supply system provides 1.2 billion gallons of water daily to approximately nine million people in New York City, as well as a number of communities in Orange, Putnam, Ulster, and Westchester counties.
Let’s make this easy and calculate with 10 million people. Then consumption per person per day is 120 gallons.
I find that number incredibly high. This of course includes industrial consumption, but I am not aware of huge industries in NYC that consume immense amounts of waters like for example paper mills.
Researching further a NYT piece from 2006 came up. It speaks of a laudible 28% decrease of NYC consumption since 1979. But it reports current consumption per person per day in New York City as 137 gallons.
For comparison I checked the 2006 year-end report (pdf-english) of the water authority here in Hamburg, Germany. It supplies 2 million inhabitants.
According to the report consumption per person per day in 2006 was 29 gallons (= 110 liters) and this includes industry and trade. According to the longer German version (pdf) of the same report water usage is on a downtrend. In 1996 people used 33.8 gallons (= 128 liters) per day.
Personally I find these numbers still too high and try to use less. India, as an extreme though probably not comparable example, has a consumption of some 6.6 gallon per person per day.
But the industrialization and standard of living in Hamburg and NYC are quite compareable. I understand that summer in NYC are hotter than in Hamburg, but a 4+ times higher consumption per head seems incredibly high.
What are these people doing with their water?