Opinion: City engagement with citizens needs complete overhaul
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This time last year, the city was gripped by the longest-ever public hearing in city council's history. More than 700 Calgarians spoke on the blanket rezoning policy proposal.
Following its approval by council, city administration is implementing it by preparing amendments to the existing land-use bylaw. Proposed changes include consolidating dwelling type categories and enabling more lot coverage, meaning less space for greenery.
Other recent policy changes include the new 20-year Parks Plan, and the GAMEPlan for public recreation facilities.
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All of these policies are supposed to flow from the Calgary Plan, the new 30-year strategy for Calgary's overall growth and development. The Calgary Plan was delayed after some 40 community associations wrote a joint letter to council outlining their concerns. It will return in 2026.
Yet, at this very moment, administration is proposing strategies and bylaw changes without the guidance of the Calgary Plan. It gets worse, because October's municipal election is right around the corner, when many issues will be up for debate. Already, candidates under the Community First banner have committed to reversing blanket rezoning in the next council.
It makes little sense for administration to move forward with contentious policy changes that are clearly not yet resolved.
We, the people, govern ourselves. We should not be stuck with the direction of unelected officials — they recommend, our representatives decide. Instead, we have a situation where administration produces multi-year policy changes, council rubber stamps them, and Calgarians are left bewildered at how the city is run.
It gets even worse. City administration's engagement with Calgarians is broken.
At a parks plan presentation to community volunteers last month, a confusing strategy document was outlined. To take one example, it considers schools, parks and green spaces to be interchangeable.
There's little in it to help Calgarians understand what will happen to our parks. Will communities get playgrounds? Will washrooms be added? Even the data on which the plan is supposedly based does not exist.
Complicated strategies need real engagement. This is engagement that gathers and incorporates public input into documents. Then, a two-way verification process refines additional feedback to compose a plan for presentation to council.
To see what really happens, let's return to the parks plan. Its public engagement occurred in 2023. Two years later, it's presented to council with no time for additional input from those who made the effort to provide feedback.
Or consider the bylaw changes to accommodate blanket rezoning. Engagement is ongoing, but will comments be incorporated and amendments validated before they go to council next year?
Then there's Cowboys Park. It was announced and construction was underway before public outcry forced administration to conduct engagement. Why would anyone provide feedback when decisions have already been made and shovels are in the ground?
Such a process generates the feeling that people's time is being wasted. And it creates a scramble to reach councillors before a vote. This is not collaborative policy-making; it's prescription and imposition.
So what can we do?
First, make sure to ask questions of candidates during the municipal election campaign. There are plenty of issues to raise. Do they support blanket rezoning? Will they protect park spaces? Will they ensure administration conducts real engagement? How will they fund city services and infrastructure?
Ask until you get answers. Don't accept any runaround. Election campaigns are precisely the time to evaluate candidates' commitments and intentions.
Then there's the most important thing to do: get up and vote. Turnout can be low for municipal elections. But this next election isn't one to miss. Major changes are coming or are being developed, and administration is doing a poor job of engaging Calgarians.
Inform yourself and vote. Otherwise, decisions about Calgary's future will be made without you.
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We spoke with experts, retired and working city engineers, and obtained hundreds of pages of internal documents through a Freedom of Information request — the latter of which took more than half a year. We trace the history of the pipe, explain its workings and the difficulty of inspecting it, and delve into internal documents that show how the city had been planning to test it for at least a decade before it ruptured. Ultimately, this story aims to answer an important question: What can we as a city learn from the failure of one of our most important systems? 1. The rupture Christina Pilarski was pushing a cart inside a grocery store on June 5, 2024, when she heard her cellphone buzz. It was her neighbour: Get water, there's been a water main break, the text read. Soon, a cascade of messages from other friends flooded Pilarski's inbox, filling her with unease. She wasn't alone. The entire city was absorbing the news of not just any pipe burst, but a significant failure of its drinking water distribution network that would threaten its supply to hundreds of thousands of Calgarians. Pilarski, who lives along 33rd Avenue N.W. in the community of Bowness, rushed home with her husband. Stepping out of her car, she was struck by a whistling sound from a nearby enclosure, as if something was 'being emptied.' The sound pierced through her home, spreading a sense of alarm. She dialled 311 and informed an operator about the issue. Pilarski recalled city workers stationed outside her driveway months earlier, in January, installing a black monitoring device on a manhole, caged in an orange fence. The neighbours jokingly referred to it as their 'orange gate.' The next day, Pilarski and her husband realized what they hoped was a minor inconvenience was something much larger. The broken pipe, known as the Bearspaw south feeder main, distributed most of the output from a water treatment plant that supplied 60 per cent of the drinking water in the city. And its rupture had unfolded in their neighbourhood. The entire community was now under a temporary boil water advisory. 'It was like camping in our home,' Pilarski said. The ordeal, expected to last a week, would hang over Calgarians for a month, forcing the city to curtail the use of water outdoors as well as ordering a reduction of its consumption indoors. Calgary declared a state of emergency, and the province helped the city in its mission to restore the pipe. Thousands of Calgarians, including city staff, mobilized for those in need. Workers, meanwhile, brought the structure back to life by excavating it, replacing some segments and strengthening others with concrete. The line was back up and running a few days ahead of schedule. A month later, the predicament resurfaced after staff discovered additional weaknesses in the feeder main. The incident, which cost Calgarians more than $35 million to address, raised important questions about the city's infrastructure and how the crisis might have been averted. City officials reiterated numerous times they had never anticipated such a severe failure. However, Pilarski often returned to the whistling noise outside her driveway on the day of the break. She found it beyond coincidental that the same stretch of the pipe which had burst had been monitored by the city for months. Pilarski posed a question to a Postmedia reporter in August: What were they checking? 2. A new dawn The origins of the Bearspaw south feeder main can be traced back to a time when Calgary's drinking water system was undergoing a metamorphosis. Like many important changes, this transformation was preceded by a disaster. A heavy flood in 1929 revealed various problems in the city's network, one of which was contaminated water, initially drawn from the Elbow River by a wooden stave pipe. As if to turn a new page, the city revamped the entire system, starting with a new line by the Elbow River in the south. The initiative included Calgary's first water treatment plant and a large concrete cylinder pipe that sent water from the plant to a group of smaller pipes. The upgrade was one of the largest capital projects in the city's history. Calgary's water distribution system is so intricate that even experienced engineers could spend years thoroughly understanding all of its aspects. But think of this system as a network of roads and highways. An artery like the Trans-Canada Highway pours traffic from other regions into Calgary and then gives way to a web of smaller streets, which eventually wind up at your doorstep. After 1933, water from the Elbow River was dammed and guided into the Glenmore water treatment plant, where it was made safe to drink. The plant then pushed the water through a pump station into a large pipe, known as a feeder main, the system's highway that directs the flow of drinking water into reservoirs, which range in size from bodies spanning a few kilometres to an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Each of these reservoirs serves a specific area, known as a pressure zone. These zones comprise homes and establishments that receive water from the reservoirs through a maze of smaller pipes. A reservoir also has a separate pump station that supplies other reservoirs through a feeder main, and the process is repeated across the city. Such stations are also installed along the main. The Glenmore Reservoir network was constructed when the city's population was 85,000. By 1965, the figure hovered around 320,000, and the oil boom drove the projections even higher. The city needed a new line by 1970 to serve a growing number of residents. The vision was of a line that drew water from the Bearspaw Reservoir, built in 1954, and released it into a separate treatment plant, which by 1975 would serve broader swathes of the city through two pipes — one snaking its way to the north and the other to the south, the latter of which would demand the attention of Calgarians five decades later. Hired on the team to design the Bearspaw south feeder main was a 26-year-old engineer named James Buker. Back then, as is the case now, cities decided on the composition of their feeder mains from variations of two kinds of pipes: concrete and steel. The more expensive steel structures, also used by oil and gas companies, are sturdier and sometimes last longer; however, they need an internal and external coating that would protect them from corrosion and keep the water from being exposed to rust. Buker described this provision as 'a pain in the a–.' 'So that's expensive,' said Buker, now in his early 80s, and whose eyes widen as he talks about drinking water systems. 'So that's why we were so happy always to get the concrete pipes, because you didn't have to put a corrosion system on them.' However, choosing from the kinds of pipes isn't simply a matter of one's preference. The city, as stipulated by the American Water Works Association, has a bidding process and whichever company from a pre-qualified list of prospects makes the most competitive bid and meets the city's requirements clinches the deal. 'You don't get some fly-by-night company that comes in and throws a low bid, and you have to give it to them, and then they cut corners,' Buker said. The city settled for a combination of steel and concrete for the 11-kilometre feeder main, which began at the Bearspaw Water Treatment Plant near the intersection of Nose Hill Drive and Stoney Trail at the northwestern edge of Calgary and wound its way to Memorial Drive near the Peace Bridge downtown. The initial stretch of the feeder line would be made of steel and run for 1.6 kilometres. The second section, 5.6 kilometres long, would be composed of pre-stressed concrete, and the final leg would be a thinner version of the same pipe. The pre-stressed concrete pipe along the feeder main would be a concrete cylinder, covered in a thin layer of steel, fortified by wires coiled around it. The materials are then wrapped again in cement, to strengthen the structure. The feeder main was completed in 1975. Four years later, a similar kind of concrete pipe would explode in Florida a year after being installed, raising alarms about the viability of its design. That same line would burst again a year later, bringing stricter international standards to the pipe. Decades later, researchers would find concrete pipes were prone to catastrophic ruptures. They would say its weaknesses were mitigated after stricter guidelines were imposed in the 1980s, and the worst year for the pipe's standards was 1965, five years before the city began building a new line. However, Buker said he couldn't have known any of that then. The model was on the list of pipes approved by the AWWA, and Buker and his colleagues believed they were building a structure that would outlive its creators. He recalled the day when he received a green light from a city contractor about the feeder main's final inspections. He was in his office, elated. He remembered thinking, 'That was the biggest pipe' he had ever helped construct. 3. Pioneers It is ironic that two catastrophic failures of water systems — in the industry, one is considered too many — have befallen a city informally referred to as the oil and gas capital of the country. Alberta is home to two global pipeline inspection companies. Calgary, meanwhile, has been at the forefront of pipeline inspection, said Ron Hugo, an engineering professor at the University of Calgary who specializes in inspection technologies. Hugo said most of the advanced techniques have been developed in the past 20 years, owing to what he calls the micro-electronic revolution, which has allowed inspectors to insert smaller testing equipment into running pipes. Until then, they had to be switched off and physically inspected. One of the engineers behind these checks was Roy Brander. Brander, who retired in 2016 and now lives in Vancouver, explained the workings of a physical inspection. First, inspectors would cut a hole the size of a bathroom. 'Then they would shut down the pipe, and a guy would walk down, and his inspection tool would be called a hammer,' he said. 'So, the guy would take the hammer and bang on the pipe like somebody testing a church bell, saying, 'Does this sound right?' ' The staff noted weaknesses in these structures by the sound of such instruments, but were unable to detect any breaks among wires, which helped keep the pipe together. 'That was the inspection technology level before these guys came along in the 1980s,' Brander added. By 'these guys', he meant Pipeline Inspection and Condition Analysis, established in Edmonton in 1972, and Pure Technologies, founded in Calgary in 1993. 'The entire world came to Alberta, hat in hand to look for pipeline inspectors,' Brander said. 'Unless you lived in Calgary and Edmonton, in which case the pipeline inspectors would have their quiet days and come hat in hand into your office saying, 'We'd like to expand our oil and gas inspection business into water, and it's getting so cheap now.' ' Hugo said another primitive way of examining a pipe was to drain it and send a robotic device along with an inspector. The device created an electromagnetic field that interacted with the wires, while a sensor in the appliance checked for breaks. Over time, the prowess of both companies has manifested in various forms of inspection, ranging from tethered to free-range devices that deploy several sensors, such as video cameras, microphones, electromagnetic fields, ultrasonic waves, and X-ray beams, to tease out the condition of pipes. A local invention was the SmartBall, created by Pure Technologies. The ball, used by the city in the late 2000s, featured a microphone and swam along an operating pipe, amassing hours of sound recordings in its quest for leaks. However, until the early 2000s, the latest technologies weren't designed for larger pipes, Brander said, because testing mains that were hardly ever replaced didn't bear an economic incentive. 'So, the driver for inventing a separate set of inspection technologies for the feeder mains was entirely disaster avoidance.' Another justification for skimping on assessing them is the toll it would take on residents. Turning the mains' taps off would mean cutting supply to reservoirs, finding alternate ways to service neighbourhoods and forcing residents to conserve water for days or even weeks, a major inconvenience that doesn't yield any rewards besides concluding everything's operating as it should. 'Needless to say, to have a pipe running fine and then have an engineer walk into the boss's office saying, 'Boss, we have this magic gadget that just says your pipe is on the very brink of blowing and you should declare a big emergency and replace it' — you only get to do that once in your career, right?' Brander said. 'And if you're wrong, you've just thrown away millions of dollars and inconvenienced 100,000 people for a week, and you're out the door.' What didn't help was the city's inability to dedicate the level of resources that oil and gas companies devoted to monitoring their pipelines. 'Their product costs $100 a barrel; ours costs about a nickel a barrel,' Brander said. 'And so it's just not worth inspecting water pipelines when it was costing several million dollars to do the inspection and only $30 million to replace the pipe — you'd just run everything to failure.' As a result, until the early 2000s, Calgary's feeder mains were never inspected. Brander understood what would spur the city to action — the kind of event that had ushered in its modernized water system many decades ago: a disaster. He recalled a conversation in 2003 when his colleague asked him about why the city didn't have a budget for inspecting feeder mains. 'I said, 'None has ever broken, and the day one of them breaks, we'll have a million dollars a year to inspect them.' ' Eight months later, that moment arrived. 4. The reckoning It came before dawn. On Jan. 26, 2004, a section of a feeder main on McKnight Boulevard in northeast Calgary cracked open, depriving more than 100,000 residents of water and flooding the streets as temperatures dropped below -35C. Vehicles were submerged in frozen drinking water. Firefighters used boats to rescue motorists. Residents resorted to filling their toilets with snow. Buker said that at first, he and his colleagues thought someone had intentionally torn the pipe. Over time, it became apparent the break wasn't a product of civilian malice but structural decay. The pipe 'looked like talcum powder,' Buker said in an earlier interview. A post-mortem of the feeder main revealed the major culprit behind the failure was sulphate, which had weakened the exterior mortar, turning it porous and corroding the steel wires and pipe barrel underneath. The pipe, whose model was similar to that of the Bearspaw south feeder main, was sulphate resistant, Brander said, but the concentration of the chemical in the soil at the time exceeded the structure's threshold by about a factor of four. The pipe was only 20 years old. The incident cost the city $1.5 million to repair and inconvenienced tens of thousands of people. A reckoning was on the horizon. Brander said the city began dedicating its employees and outside specialists to test feeder mains. The shift was akin to moving from general practitioners to medical specialists. 'They were like cardiologists as opposed to your neighbourhood doctor,' he said. 'Because you're shutting down not somebody's block, but an entire part of a network, and the water still has to get through to everybody using other parts of the network.' The team of specialists was made up of engineers with PhD degrees in different fields, including pipelines and chemistry, who gave presentations to city staffers on different inspection technologies and how to prioritize sections that needed testing — mainly because, Brander said, Calgary's feeder main network ran up to 300 kilometres, and the city could only evaluate a sliver of them every year. Several factors contributed to identifying the strips of feeder mains that were at risk, but they boiled down to soil quality and the criticality of the pipe. Brander said the city teams looked for pond sediments — black, organic, sulphur-rich soil that is great for your garden, but potentially fatal to the metal it touches. Meanwhile, gravel and sand were less corrosive and, as a result, less worrying. The Bearspaw south feeder main, cutting across the Bow River, was buried in soil of the latter kind. Soil samples from 2014, which were included in the city's investigation of last year's Bearspaw south feeder main break, showed the amount of chloride — considered a major contributor to the rupture in 2024 — in the soil along the pipe was below problematic levels and, in some areas, was negligible (sulphur wasn't considered to be at play). The city continued to inspect portions of feeder mains it deemed at risk years after the McKnight water main burst in 2004. It even replaced some of them, according to Brander (The city had to shut down the feeder mains for more conclusive tests). A slide from a 2007 staff presentation shows the city had replaced 340 metres of feeder main sections, a little over 0.1 per cent of the network, costing taxpayers $1.2 million. However, many of those inspections were experimental. For instance, six years after the break, in 2010, funding for inspections was still allocated in the city's capital utilities' budget under the term 'water main research.' 'Every inspection was still a research project, uncertain to produce ANYTHING useful,' Brander wrote in an email exchange. 'We were developing the technology of inspection, just as much as we were inspecting at all.' Despite the efforts to check its pipes, the Bearspaw south feeder main was never inspected. The plan for an inspection following a series of shutdowns would come two decades later, months after it would fail, internal documents show. Engineers who have worked with the city have said the intention to test the pipe arose from its criticality, not from its risk of failure. That's why many were shocked when it ruptured so severely in June 2024. 'I'm standing there with egg on my face, saying, 'Well, it just wasn't the right soil to look in,' ' Brander said. 'The last place you'd look for a broken pipe was right beside the river.' He compared learning about the burst with finding a dead body in the Grand Canyon — 'only it has polar bear wounds.' 5. The insider Internal documents obtained by Postmedia through a Freedom of Information and Privacy request show the city staff had repeatedly considered inspecting the Bearspaw south feeder main since at least 2014, but didn't implement their plans until the pipe ruptured a decade later. An internal report from 2014 stated the city needed to shut the main down to install main valves, conduct an inspection and construct utility crossings — separate pieces of equipment that go above or under a pipe. The feeder main had never been inspected, the report stated, as there was no other means to transfer the nearly 400 million litres a day from the Bearspaw treatment plant 'to where the water is needed.' A hydraulic analysis, which examines and predicts aspects such as water pressure, flow rate, and velocity of a pipe, found a shutdown would not negatively affect the water system if citywide demand was below 445 million litres per day, a goal that was considered unviable for the summer months when daily use exceeds more than 500 million litres. However, the pipe wasn't shut down that year, as a subsequent report would indicate. The next year, the city considered another attempt, this time by preparing a 250-page emergency response strategy to shut it down. The plan, like in 2014, was to switch off the feeder main for a construction or repair job of a sewer tanker in Bowness that intersected it, while simultaneously conducting inspections of the pipe. The gargantuan task of isolating the Bearspaw south feeder main was now possible, thanks to infrastructure improvements in 2015, the report by the city's Water Resources department added, while acknowledging the challenges. 'The lack of experience isolating the feeder main, coupled with the criticality of the feeder main, makes isolating the BP South Feeder one of the most challenging shutdown tasks,' the report stated. It detailed a list of criteria required for a shutdown to be successful, including lowering water demand and ensuring the health of pump stations and valves that are crucial to the pipe's functioning. The report recommended stopping the flow of the pipe without completely emptying it to make it easier for the city to detect leaks. 'If a failure occurs while the feeder main is fully isolated, crews will not have to scramble to close the next set of valves to completely isolate the feeder main.' The main wasn't turned off, as subsequent staff emails years later revealed, although it remains unclear why. Seven years later, the city channelled its attempts at inspecting larger, more consequential pipes into a new program called Stage Gate. Its objective, among other things, was to assess the condition of between two and five kilometres of feeder mains per year and test out new technologies that analyze the reliability of such infrastructure. In 2022, the program's accomplishments included installing an acoustic monitoring system along the resurrected McKnight feeder main that picks up signals such as temperature and vibrations to sleuth out leaks or wire breaks. Among its remaining tasks was to inspect the Bearspaw south feeder line, mainly because, the city admitted in the program's summary, 'concrete pipes … typically have a higher priority because of their tendency to break catastrophically.' The next year, the pipe made it to another list: 'high-priority' candidates for a condition assessment. One reason why city officials wanted to inspect the pipe was that staff believed it could withstand a higher water pressure than usual. An internal presentation, dated May 29, 2023, recommended a condition assessment and structural review before raising the pressure to increase its daily supply of drinking water to the southern half of the city. A test shutdown was finally scheduled for Dec. 18, 2023, and in an internal email dated Oct. 13, 2023, an infrastructure engineer updated Chris Graham, the city's head of Utility Asset Management, that the city would look for wire breaks and establish a baseline condition with which it would compare future results from monitoring the pipe. However, the scope of the December 2023 test was reduced to turning off the taps of the feeder main. Instead, the closure was now a precursor to a more extensive planned shutdown in March 2024 that would check the pipe for a series of issues, including its ability to withstand higher pressure. 'We just basically stopped pumping water into the pipe to verify that we can move water through the city without water flowing down that pipe,' Graham told Postmedia in a recent interview. City staff used a computer model that simulated the feeder main, and the December test confirmed their ability to proceed with the more extensive project in the spring. Sclater Peterson, leader of operational performance at the city, who oversaw both shutdowns, said the city also needed to complete maintenance work, including replacing malfunctioning air valves, which regulate air flow in and out of the pipe. 'We were also putting on what we call pressure loggers,' Peterson said, which were used to monitor the force of the water rushing through the pipe. The city also tested out a new acoustic monitoring technology for any wire breaks. 'Not quite as accurate, but we thought it was a chance to try out that technology while we're doing the shutdown,' Graham said. The spring project's statement of requirements stressed the importance of assessing the pipe's condition. 'This is a critical feeder main, and failure poses risks of water service interruptions, environmental impacts, property damage, and injury to the public, etc.,' it stated. 'The City seeks to monitor the pipeline for changes in the structural condition during and after this work, as it has not been depressurized in many years, and the current condition is unknown.' By Jan. 24, 2024, the city had identified eight locations along the pipe that would be monitored, one of which included the road outside Pilarski's house. The project began on March 18 and was scheduled to run until June 30. Once completed, the city was poised in the fall of that year to insert a device called a pipe diver that would swim along the flowing main, plucking data by creating an electromagnetic field. Before that could take place, on June 5, the pipe along those segments caved in, eventually triggering a state of local emergency. 6. The aftermath Ward 1 Coun. Sonya Sharp was attending the official opening of the BMO Centre expansion when she received a text from her husband. The ambitious $500-million project, which made Calgary home to the largest convention centre in Western Canada, was a source of pride for the local administration. As she exited the event, Sharp was entering a crisis. Her husband had learned about the pipe's rupture from their family friends who were attending a lacrosse game at nearby Shouldice Park. One of the kids rushed to his parents, urging his father to move their car as water was spilling outside the parking lot. Soon, the water rose to the doors of vehicles. Sharp, whose ward was heavily affected by the pipe burst, recalls jumping on calls all night, preparing herself and her team for the unravelling of this crisis. 'The first real 24 hours (were) insane,' she said. 'I have never experienced something like that other than the (2013) flood and COVID-19.' The next day, Bowness residents were under a boil water advisory. Sharp began receiving a cascade of calls and messages from her constituents, all searching for answers: How long do we have to keep boiling water? When is this going to end? 'Members of the community of Bowness started to have PTSD from the flood,' she said. On some days, her community was unrecognizable. She was struck when she volunteered with her colleagues, handing out bottles of water to residents. 'I would think to myself, 'What country do we live in?' ' she said. 'You would see new moms coming, holding their babies with buckets of water because they needed the water for the formula. You would see the vulnerable population show up because they needed water, and they didn't have access to water, and the city was doing the best it could with the water wagons, but we needed more.' A day after the break, the city began holding daily briefings on its efforts to mend the broken pipe. It advanced Stage 4 restrictions, forbidding outdoor water use. Calgarians, meanwhile, were asked to reduce a quarter of their indoor consumption as workers made repairs. A week later, the city announced it had identified five areas along the feeder that urgently required fixing. More than 12.5 per cent of the 9.6-kilometre concrete pipe was near the edge of dysfunction, a city investigation later revealed. The timeline was now stretched by five weeks, further deepening the state of uncertainty among Calgarians. 'If we were to complete current repairs and restore water to the feeder main without making the repairs, we would be at high risk of an additional catastrophic break,' Susan Henry, chief of the Calgary Emergency Management Agency, told members of city council in an email. 'The risk is simply too high. We need to act immediately to ensure long term stability of our city's water network.' Residents like Pilarski at the epicentre of the emergency were learning about updates on the issue from the communication the local administration broadcast to the entire city. 'As neighbours, we really pulled together and came together, but our communication came from the construction folks, from the media and from one another,' Pilarski said. 'We never heard useful or personalized information,' she added, referring to official communications from the city. She continued to encounter problems with receiving such updates, even after Mayor Jyoti Gondek publicly apologized early into the incident for the city's confusing and slow release of information, vowing 'we will do a much better job of explaining what's happened.' Despite being privy to information inaccessible to most Calgarians, Sharp also had unanswered questions. 'If this pipe was old and we knew it was old, why weren't we inspecting it often?' Sharp said, recalling her questions at the time. 'What would have caused something like this? Was it natural, or was it human error?' The Bearspaw south feeder main was restored by July 1, just in time for Stampede. The bulk of the repairs included reinforcing the mortar with an encasement designed by a company called Associated Engineering. However, a little more than a month later, the city announced it had found 16 additional weaknesses along the pipe, and the staff intended to fix those spots before the pipe failed, again. Once more, Calgarians were asked to cut their indoor water usage by 25 per cent. The news was met with resignation. While residents — Pilarski among them — along 33rd Avenue N.W. where most of the repairs would take place expressed frustration, they knew the city was being proactive, and the disruption would contribute to the greater good. Two months later, on Oct. 16, the city discovered three more segments of the pipe that needed repair, but this time, no restrictions were imposed. Complicating the discovery was that some pipes adjacent to very corrosive chloride levels only showed mild distress. The report speculated that shifting groundwater around the feeder main may have played a role, while calling for further analysis. For some, the report raised even more questions. Sharp finds 'road de-icing' an insufficient explanation for the skyrocketing levels of chloride in the past decade. 'Are our roads worse than they were before?' she said. 'Has it snowed more? Has it been icy or more? Like, what does that mean?' Coun. Raj Dhaliwal, an engineer by trade, has said the report falls short of providing a definitive answer on the specific catalyst for the pipe's rupture on June 5. He questioned why the feeder main was billed in the city's asset management program as low probability, high risk in the event of a failure, especially since AWWA's research has found that loosened regulations around concrete pipes in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to breakdowns across the globe. 'Why didn't we risk-rank it properly and make it more of a higher probability failure?' he said. In other words, why didn't the city prioritize inspecting the feeder main when concrete pipes were considered risky? The city did deem it important, Graham said. He said that in a 2017 risk assessment, the city enlisted the Bearspaw south feeder main as a candidate for inspection, but not before other feeder mains, which were considered riskier because they were buried in soil with higher concentrations of sulphate. 'The chlorides were a little bit of a surprise to us,' he added. The city, Graham said, has learned its lesson and is now prioritizing inspections based on not only the likelihood of a pipe's failure but also the severity of its consequences. 'That's really what we've altered in our logic.' Many more questions will find an outlet in an independent review led by Siegfried Kiefer, a retired ATCO executive. The examination will comprise five others and will be completed by the end of 2025. 7. Reflections The driver behind these questions is a human tendency to understand how we could prevent catastrophic failures of such scale. But the answer isn't simple, says Kerry Black, engineering professor at the University of Calgary, who specializes in water systems. 'Now you're not going to catch everything,' Black said. 'It's impossible because it's buried underground.' With a network that spans thousands of kilometres, the city can only inspect so many pipes every year. 'You're prioritizing and triaging and risk managing, because you can't address everything,' Black added. Black's belief is backed by the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta. After reviewing the feeder main break, it found 'the City of Calgary had sound engineering oversight and the appropriate risk-based management in place to meet the expectations required of an APEGA permit holder.' Brander also agrees. He argued that instead of focusing on how the break could have been averted, we should be asking why the pipe was too big to fail. Backup infrastructure, or redundancy, would have made this incident a minor inconvenience, not an emergency. However, predicting what a city would look like decades into the future is prone to miscalculations. 'We're always going to be in a situation of trying to deal with infrastructure decisions of the past,' Black said. Nevertheless, the incident has sparked important discussions about the level of spending we need to maintain our infrastructure, just as the McKnight feeder main break did in 2004. The city has so far planned for a new water treatment plant adjacent to the Bearspaw facility, along with resurrecting the North Calgary Water Servicing Project, a 22-kilometre feeder main that had been stalled for years and eventually cancelled in 2021. The city can't assume the entire blame for nixing such projects, Black said. From 1955 to 2003, capital investment from the federal government for infrastructure halved, according to data by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Cities, meanwhile, have been forced to shoulder the burden. However, we cannot afford to be as reactive as we once were about infrastructure spending, especially regarding our drinking water systems, according to an engineering professor. As climate change wreaks havoc across the globe, fuelling wildfires, causing droughts and melting glaciers, water is increasingly becoming an important geopolitical asset. 'The discussion we're having right now, we wouldn't have had it 30 or 40 years ago,' said Alireza Bayat, a civil and environmental engineering professor. 'We were all taking water for granted. It was a cheap municipal service, but it is now seen as an economic lifeline.' The U.S. has already expressed its desire for Canada's water, and several countries around the globe are on the verge of conflicts over the essential life source. Calgary, being on arid land where the risk of drought is always present, should understand the value of water more than any other city. It is now up to us taxpayers on how we choose to value such systems. 'Whether we like it or not, we can either pay more for it after it breaks and fails, or we can pay a little bit now and slowly work towards systems that are robust and have regular maintenance,' Black said. ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ Main image at top: Workers at the site of a break in the Bearspaw south feeder main along 16th Avenue N.W. in Montgomery on June 6, 2024. Photo by Darren Makowichuk/Postmedia Share this article in your social network Comments You must be logged in to join the discussion or read more comments. Create an Account Sign in Join the Conversation Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.
Montreal Gazette
3 days ago
- Montreal Gazette
As Calgary brings back fluoride, councillor urges Montreal to reconsider West Island decision
By As Calgary prepares to reintroduce fluoride to its drinking water later this month, one of their city councillors is calling upon Montreal to reconsider removing it from West Island faucets — and trust the science. Calgary took away fluoride from its water in 2011 as a cost-cutting measure. Dental health declined over the next decade, according to city councillor Gian-Carlo Carra, who has been involved in the fluoride debate throughout. In 2021, Calgarians voted in a municipal election to reinstate water fluoridation. 'We've had fluoride out of the water for over 10 years. That was 10 years we could track a against other cities. We could track a worsening in the condition of our kids' teeth and in our population's teeth,' Carra said in an interview Monday. As Carra reflects on Calgary's decision-making on fluoride, he's appealing to Montreal to learn from Calgary's missteps and to 'trust the data.' 'The data shows that it helps,' he added. A 2021 study on second-grade children in Calgary found that the proportion of children with dental caries rose from 56.6 per cent in 2011 to 64.8 per cent in 2018, seven years after the city stopped fluoridating its water. In November, Montreal's agglomeration council voted to end fluoridation of West Island drinking water, also to save costs. Although 87 per cent of the agglomeration council is made up of Montreal councillors who largely voted against fluoride, the 13-per-cent minority representing the suburbs — particularly West Island officials — fought to maintain it. Fluoridation at the Dorval and Pointe-Claire plants was set to finish by early 2025. Benjamin Blanc, a spokesperson for the city of Pointe-Claire, confirmed the practice actually stopped at the end of fall 2024. The Gazette contacted the cities of Montreal and Dorval for clarification but did not receive a response in time for publication. For Kirkland Mayor Michel Gibson, Calgary's decision to bring back fluoride demonstrates it's not too late for Montreal to reconsider its own fluoride policy for the West Island. 'I'm not finished fighting this battle,' he said in an interview Tuesday, adding that he plans to raise the issue during Montreal's municipal election this fall and is prepared to challenge it in court if necessary. While Calgary residents were able to vote directly on the fluoride issue through a municipal election ballot, Pointe-Claire Mayor Tim Thomas said that's not an option for West Island residents, who cannot vote in the Montreal municipal election. He explained that under the current structure of the agglomeration council, decisions affecting the West Island are ultimately made by Montreal city councillors, who significantly outnumber suburban representatives. 'The point here is that we can't decide water for our own citizens with our own plant,' Thomas said in an interview. 'Our citizens, who paid for that plant, should have the option of deciding how it's used for them.' Beaconsfield Mayor Georges Bourelle said in an interview Monday that during the fall agglomeration council debates on fluoride, he pointed to Calgary as a cautionary tale. He is not hopeful Montreal will reinstate fluoride because of the way the agglomeration council is organized, which he described as 'undemocratic.' 'Politically, the worst thing that the provincial government did was to set up the agglomeration the way it is,' he said. Montreal's decision prioritized cost savings over public health, said Baie-D'Urfe Mayor Heidi Ektvedt. 'I personally don't even believe that this is about fluoride. I personally think that there was money to be saved by pulling it, and why spend it in the West Island for a population who doesn't even vote for (Montreal),' she said in an interview Monday. She added that several citizens have reached out to her about Calgary refluoridating its water. 'I'm happy for Calgary that they're putting it back into their water,' she said. 'But you know, Montreal is going to tell you, let's look at Sweden. They'll talk about the States — everybody's pulling out of fluoride in the States,' referring to possible examples cited by the city to justify not fluoridating. 'I like to look at Calgary and see that it was done in a democratic way.'
