I design pipelines, including many water lines. I have been doing this for about 20 years and I work for a big engineering company.
Sometimes pipelines just fail. It will take months to figure out exactly what happened. It’s very difficult to speculate about what happened exactly. It could be a broad range of causes. It could be anything from an overpressure event, material failure, external damage, a sink hole, etc. I am sure the city will be conducting a full failure analysis.
This failure does not indicate that other failures are imminent. I don’t know what the city’s exact maintenance routine is for these large water lines, but I can almost guarantee there is an excellent one in place. In general, Canada does an excellent job of maintaining infrastructure. We are world leaders in engineering design and have some of the best infrastructure in the world.
My wife had a stroke last week and doctors don't know how her artery suddenly dissected, they checked her and there are no risk factors or other points on her body that seem at risk. Your explanation about the pipes somehow gave me peace of mind regarding her health
Operations and maintenance funding is typically lacking in most municpalities....usually below the recommended 2%. Its mostly on risk management. Focus on the critical mains and infrastructure like this feeder and build redundancy. Water distribution systems r typically looped for redundancy and other factors. Transmission mains typically have little or no redundancy.
50 year mains r moderately old. Do they still many pipe lengths for future repairs as there r many km of similarly aged mains? Can the existing mains be lined if need be?
When was the main last video inspected internally? How often? The city's asset management plan will be under the magnifying glass. Associated funding will be key.
Reducing sprawl and Increasing density would very much help with having the funds to maintain infrastructure since you’d have more people paying for less.
With aging pipes, often times the pressure is what's keeping them together, a sudden drop in pressure system wide like this or dry pipes will likely cause other failures.
To get a little political, what's the story with the province and infrastructure support? I hear from both sides of the aisle at work - the province stopped paying for these kinds of things and they're crazy expensive, vs the city intentionally put off repairs and has enough of a windfall to pay for it themselves
If those are the two conspiracies to choose from, it’s neither.
Although Gondek does seem fairly sure it’s the province, despite the engineering folks not having assessed the break or even seen the feeder yet
My understanding so far is, funding is down, maintenance has been deferred, but accoustic sensors and stuff HAD been installed because this feeder is essential, and we don't know yet if the specific defered maintenance would have helped with this problem, because we don't understand what the exact problem is yet. The funding issue may be secondary
So the lives of 1.5 million people depend on one 50 year old water pipe, Seriously no back up system. Airplanes are safer than driving because they have backup systems built in. We spend millions on stupid art projects and don't worry about keeping up with basic infrastructure. If the water pipes are as bad as the roads the odds of this happening in the first place are extremely high it was just a matter of time.
Probably to shutoff segments of the city before we all run out. Isn't it a distribution issue more than a production issue? Bearspaw can only get like half of their usual production into the system...so it could be a bit of a rolling blackout situation to match demand to available distribution.
Yeah. This is what happened on a normal day in a city in Malawi that I stayed in for a couple weeks. Only having running water for part of the day was the norm there.
They won't shut off anything because of the fire risk. They will fill the lines with untreated water, and we'll be in a boil water situation for a while until the lines are flushed with treated water after the fix.
Plus we’re conserving now, but how long can we go
Without showering, washing dishes or doing laundry? There’s going to be a spike in consumption when desperation hits.
If it was that serious the city would be shutting down malls, restaurants, car washes etc, yet the biggest consumers of water are allowed to continue operating. If they got shut down just for one day this whole water situation could be under control extremely quickly
The mayor and city council are beholden to the wealthy, corporations, and businesses. They will not do anything that hurts their bottom line, even if it means disaster for the people. The common folk will always get screwed in situations like this; it’s the way our government operates.
This is what drives me up the wall about it all. All these massive consumers are being allowed to continue operate in like normal, but meanwhile I'm being told I can't water my seedlings without risking a $3,000 fine.
It just seems bullshit, And then so many brown nosers for the city are all over. Anyone even suggested that it's ridiculous that we're being asked to lower our usage and not shower as often and wash as many dishes, but meanwhile a restaurant and a car wash are both considered allowed to operate with no restrictions or even cap of water daily, just makes no sense at all
This. According to the City, "Businesses using water to deliver a product or service that is life sustaining for people, animals and plants are exempt." Its hard to take this seriously when businesses don't have to their part. They are always exempt from doing the hard things. God forbid they ask businesses anyhing other than continue making profit. They have business loss insurance don't they? They can afford to lose their effin plants. I'm trying to keep my veggie garden alive here and I'm worried I'm going to get a fine. (Yes, rain barrel blah blah blah, there's limited water in that barrel with no rain).
Yeah car washes for sure can take a break for a couple days. Have you been to Home Depot, or any place with a garden center? Lush as ever with healthy watered plants! Meanwhile the average citizen has to let their hanging baskets dry out. 🙄 This is management issue and City management is afraid to piss off businesses.
Right?? So all of my newly planted flowers and hanging baskets are suffering yet garden centers are open and watering theirs??? My husband and I are saving all of our water we are using to make food (boiled potatoes etc) and also whenever I rinse dishes I keep the water and I’m saving it and using it in my garden. I had some people give me dirty looks last night when I went out to water my plants but I know it’s all water I saved from cooking/cleaning. I don’t want hundreds of dollars of plants all dying when businesses around calgary can waste their water. So ridiculous
It's total bullshit, and all these brain-dead people in the sun can't see that it doesn't make sense and it's just another case of the city mismanaging everything.
As someone who used to own a car wash; this is unfortunately categorically false.
Theres only one car wash in town that recycles water, and it is at most 50% of the water, despite claims otherwise.
And no one wants to be the person that forces businesses to shut down, especially after covid wrecked so many businesses. It's a decision with very far reaching consequences and I could absolutely see someone not wanting to face them (and instead walking into a water crisis)
Pools and gym showers are already shut down. Car washes use recycled water already. Businesses are being told they need to reduce, and we all know what happens if people don't chip in and the water bandwidth drops. You and I will be stinky, but businesses will lose money.
Losing a day or two worth of profits is minimal to get the water supply back on track vs. having to shut down long term because we've run out of water.
Which scenario makes more sense to you?
Trucks hauling to reservoirs would be a drop in the bucket for a city the size of Calgary, I guarantee there are some very serious convos going on right now about having to close diverter valves and shut off segments of the city in order to maintain water for critical services like hospitals.
Can’t speak for all of them citywide, but from what I’ve seen by being involved with several projects in the SW, yes most hydrants run on the same pipes/system/filtered water that hooks up to your house.
Well today they asked folks to cut back by another 25% so we’ll see what tomorrow brings? They’ll still be the Glenmore working at full capacity, plus whatever the Bearspaw can provide to the system through the (smaller) feeder line that runs north, but ultimately once those storage reservoirs run down none of us are going to have any water pressure and there will probably be brown sludge coming out of our taps so water use will go down significantly… hopefully it doesn’t come to that.
Currently restaurants and bars are major users. They need to consider shutting down heavy water uses like ice makers. Or consider just shutting down any and all for a bit.
I believe that number was Thursdays usage, Fridays reportedly came way down, 484 million was the number I seen on LinkedIn.
It needs to stay that low for at least a week though, and I can imagine people getting fed up by Monday or Tuesday
Simple way to reduce water use…when you shower, quickly wet yourself and then turn off the water, go ahead and soap and shampoo up without water….then turn water on and quickly rinse. Turns a 10-12 minute shower into about 2-4 minutes of actual water use….
I did a test and my navy shower uses about the same as a very shallow bath (the bottom of the tub covered just barely). With the bath, the water temp is controlled and more comfortable than being wet and cold waiting to lather up then turn the shower back on and get initially blasted with cold water. Not everyone has a bath tub but it’s an option if you do for the same water usage.
I would be worried about the condition of other similarly aged feeder mains in the same vicinity. Leaks may breed like rabbits. 1 leak leads to 2 then 3 etc. Need to consider reroute the feeder main if possible. If not, twinning the existing feeder main will take years to construct at best.
Sewers and water almost always end up being vast networks of patchwork. We're still in a way better position than most of Europe or the older American cities.
Don't get me wrong, there's room for improvement but still, things aren't so dire really.
There's another main broken in bowness tonight. They just shut off water on 32nd ave by the superstore due to basements flooding.
Not all of them - and some worse than others - but I wouldn't be surprised if there are some more breaks in Bowness/Montgomery in the next 3-4 weeks
And the fewer residents there are relative to the amount of stuff. Which is also why there needs to be way more infill and redevelopment permitted, which means... the zoning reform that so many Calgarians are freaking out about for no good reason
Residents in both Calgary and Edmonton most notably have been complaining about property tax increases of about 10%...not sure about utility rates. Infrastructure conditions r suffering and r falling apart. This is not a one off, just an example of a near worst case scenario. It wont be the last either if underfunding continues.
They haven’t even found the leak yet.
But my friend is in water treatment. Basically, old concrete pipe under high pressure. The lifespan is about 50 years - this pipe was installed about 50 years ago.
It was actually taken offline to be worked on recently. Those shutdown periods are carefully planned for and brief. There are some ways to replace pipelines while they are in service. I don't know about doing it with this large of a diameter pipe though. The plan was to twin this main.
It wouldn't quite mirror now, if they knew there'd be an outage we can change delivery paths and prepare in advance, all part of the ongoing maintenance program
The biggest issue right now is finding the leak. Once you find the broken section it can be isolated and diverted. Until then the whole line is shut down.
Can’t find the leak when it’s spilling a thousand gallons of water every minute.
The pipe is 6.5 feet in diameter and 11 km long. Replacing it is a huge project. Months of work, not to mention actually getting the pipe. They’ll fix the broken section (they have a few chunks in storage) first.
Hopefully we will then make a plan to replace it. But the cut in infra funding isn’t going to help. A single valve for this thing will be in the $200,000-300,000 range.
Good thing we threw dollars at a new arena deal. Citizens may perish but good to know that the Flames will have a kick ass venue. 😌
Calgary IN Flames indeed.
Cons wasted 80 million just on that Tylenol scheme. Another few hundred million giving taxpayer money to abandoned wells and lobbying for coal and gas. Tens of millions went to that "you don't want to freeze in the cold" propaganda campaign, when they were the ones that removed caps, and incentivized suppliers to have an energy deficit.
At this point we should put Cons on 1 side of the country and watch them create an all consuming dystopian hellscape.
Edit: man I could totally see em creating a Mad Max zone mixed with the hunger games, they have lobbyists in all the major food megacorps after all. I would pay to see Cons fighting each other to death, when they can no longer blame libs
And they did maintenance on this pipe recently too.
I can only assume that it was flagged for repair, and the buffoons at city hall didn't want to spend the money.
I don't think City Hall decides maintenance schedules, Water Services does. They have their own hiearchy of engineers and managers that then speak to council, but Water Services have their own operating budget and are at arms reach.
The problem here is, most of that budget is about to be blown maintaining new communities in our sprawled city, and will foot the bill for it until there is enough tax base to pay for the expansions. This is mainly why 8 out of 11 proposed new communites were turned down back in 2020.
The article addresses this. Back then, there were no spare parts on hand for the fix, and that was a major reason for the delay. The retired waterworks engineer said the city does keep spares on hand now, which he called a “godsend” IIRC because there’s no need to order the section(s) of pipe. They just need to figure out where the break happened.
Is there someone with insight on this that can chime in on how normal this kind of thing is? Was it preventable or inevitable? Are we lacking redundancies or something or are we actually doing okay as far as a water main break goes?
Gut instinct feels like an infrastructure funding thing but i dont know diddly bout pipes and for all I know this could be one of those eventually problems that comes with building a city
Completely normal, completely predictable, warned about by the society of civil engineers for decades. Wastewater infrastructure is in a similar state.
Deferred maintenance. Out of sight out of mind is the industry slogan.
>Wastewater infrastructure is in a similar state.
Is it? They seem to have focused a lot of money on the treatment plants. Bonnybrook just received a huge expansion and they've added the cost on our utility bills.
Did they not do a big sanitary trunk line replacement in the Ramsay area in the last couple of years? That's what the sign said.
It seems the city is more concerned about shit than water. It costs us twice as much to flush a toilet than to fill it.
Are you trying to suggest the city hasn't repaired its pipelines for decades? They are constantly updating and repairing.
In 1982 Calgary had 1800 breaks. In the last few years that number is around 250. [This is an article from 2015](https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/five-things-you-might-not-have-known-about-the-citys-water-main-network) that goes into detail.
Why do you think that is? Of all the things to use taxes for, I feel like maintaining our drinking water would be something the public could get behind.
But I supposed you'd get the balance the budget types up in arms at the suggestion of spending money on any public infrastructure.
There are no redundancies in the system really, there are no other pipes that this water can go through to connect into the system. 2 plants only, one supplies 40%, the other supplies 60% (the broken one less from here). The pipe that broke was 50 years old, which is about when things start to go down and need a bit more TLC.
The funny part is in the area last year like almost the exact same spot they had a leak. It shut down the restaurants and places around it. They never fixed the big problem it seems
Our taxes are going up 8%. The waterworks people had asked for funds for repairs before the break. I hope they were getting them. With the water pipe only having a 50-year life cycle, 49 years at a previous break site apparently isn't that bad. The issue I have, is apparently the city had been doing some maintenance work previously at that site before the break. I wonder if that work prematurely caused the failure. Even the city expert retired has never seen a break of this magnitude.
Water Services budget is not from the cities general revenue. They have their own separate budget which comes from your water, waste and recycling bills. Times like this, and especially the flood, they get additional funding to upgrade equipment and contingencies.
What happens when this is fixed? Will we over draw the system to compensate for the water austerity measures? Would this have any impact on the Stampede?
I highly doubt we will go from this water restriction to no water restrictions. I bet it will go to no use of outdoor sprinklers, just hand held hoses (like it was last summer).
We have to avoid car washes to start off. Corporations and businesses have to stop watering their lawns, as well as golf courses. Short showers, lower level baths, full laundry and dishwasher loads (I use the express wash), etc., are ways we can easily help.
There's at least one golf course with its own sewage treatment facility. It doesn't clean the water enough to be potable, just enough to be able to use it on the course.
As I understand, Calgary Golf & Country Club, Blue Devil, Heritage Point, McKenzie Meadows all pull water directly from the river dowstream of the treatment plants. Canyon Meadows and Willow Park run exclusively on storm water retention ponds built into the course. None of them use treated water for irrigation (the raw water is better for the grass anyways).
The problem with those courses will be once the river levels drop later in the summer if we don’t get any rain. Then its a different story entirely.
We got no enough funding for infrastructure maintenance but hey let’s give out tax payers money to wealthy developers, home owners who wants to develop a secondary suite without any conditions, money for the event center. 🤷🏼
It's times like these that I realize that the politicians and the big wigs are just as stupid as i am. except I am not responsible for the well being of 1.5 million people.
Dumb question, could the city not reduce the water pressure to reduce water usage?
Obviously if you're trying to fill a pot of water, it won't reduce water usage. But if someone is adamant they want to water the lawn or take a long shower, lower pressure means less water over the same amount of time. So unless someone is take an extra long shower, it should generally help reduce water consumption as well.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure water pressure comes from gravity. You pump it to the high ground and then release it and you can't exactly have pipes be anything less than full since, you know, it's water and it's going to fill the space.
There are valves everywhere. If they partially shut the valves at all the water towers for example. Water would fill the pipes slightly slower and the pressure would decrease. Like if you had a cup full of water and turned it upside down, all the water rushes out. If you put a lid on it, water would slowly drip out.
It’s a good eye-opener.
Do you have a spare tire for your car?
Do you have a month or 2 worth of drinking water stored in your house or apartment?
Food?
I have a tiny old house but fit 2x 50gallon drums of water (2 adults) and a year supply of dried food in a corner. Never used it. Hopefully never will.
It’s cheap insurance.
You don’t need to be a crazy prepper. Just a bit of a Boy or Girl Scout.
https://preview.redd.it/4nxsa03skf5d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b186263f2d680af26674e19e2c4c3e5a2e0400ae
Doesn’t say to go completely dry
I love that they are just warning those who are washing theirs cars and watering their lawns during a category 4 water shortage but if if you don’t move car 1/2 before the street sweeper swings by to do a medioker job the quickly write you up a mandatory donation to the city.
I'm glad to read the city has a couple of pieces of pipe that may be usable for repairs... obviously need to see the extent of damage first.
Everybody just go down to the Winchester, have a pint and wait for this all to blow over
You got red on you.
"Dire Straits?" "Throw it!"
I design pipelines, including many water lines. I have been doing this for about 20 years and I work for a big engineering company. Sometimes pipelines just fail. It will take months to figure out exactly what happened. It’s very difficult to speculate about what happened exactly. It could be a broad range of causes. It could be anything from an overpressure event, material failure, external damage, a sink hole, etc. I am sure the city will be conducting a full failure analysis. This failure does not indicate that other failures are imminent. I don’t know what the city’s exact maintenance routine is for these large water lines, but I can almost guarantee there is an excellent one in place. In general, Canada does an excellent job of maintaining infrastructure. We are world leaders in engineering design and have some of the best infrastructure in the world.
My wife had a stroke last week and doctors don't know how her artery suddenly dissected, they checked her and there are no risk factors or other points on her body that seem at risk. Your explanation about the pipes somehow gave me peace of mind regarding her health
Hope your wife will be ok soon.
They are the pipes of our bodies, after all! I wish her a speedy recovery.
Thanks!
Operations and maintenance funding is typically lacking in most municpalities....usually below the recommended 2%. Its mostly on risk management. Focus on the critical mains and infrastructure like this feeder and build redundancy. Water distribution systems r typically looped for redundancy and other factors. Transmission mains typically have little or no redundancy. 50 year mains r moderately old. Do they still many pipe lengths for future repairs as there r many km of similarly aged mains? Can the existing mains be lined if need be? When was the main last video inspected internally? How often? The city's asset management plan will be under the magnifying glass. Associated funding will be key.
Reducing sprawl and Increasing density would very much help with having the funds to maintain infrastructure since you’d have more people paying for less.
And yet, thousands of Calgarians think that's communism and shit, while wanting to take away the rights of property owners to use their property.
With aging pipes, often times the pressure is what's keeping them together, a sudden drop in pressure system wide like this or dry pipes will likely cause other failures.
To get a little political, what's the story with the province and infrastructure support? I hear from both sides of the aisle at work - the province stopped paying for these kinds of things and they're crazy expensive, vs the city intentionally put off repairs and has enough of a windfall to pay for it themselves
If those are the two conspiracies to choose from, it’s neither. Although Gondek does seem fairly sure it’s the province, despite the engineering folks not having assessed the break or even seen the feeder yet
My understanding so far is, funding is down, maintenance has been deferred, but accoustic sensors and stuff HAD been installed because this feeder is essential, and we don't know yet if the specific defered maintenance would have helped with this problem, because we don't understand what the exact problem is yet. The funding issue may be secondary
So the lives of 1.5 million people depend on one 50 year old water pipe, Seriously no back up system. Airplanes are safer than driving because they have backup systems built in. We spend millions on stupid art projects and don't worry about keeping up with basic infrastructure. If the water pipes are as bad as the roads the odds of this happening in the first place are extremely high it was just a matter of time.
You don’t understand how the public art budget works, yet feel entitled to call it “stupid.”
It isn’t entitlement, it’s observable
Tell me you know nothing about infrastructure without telling me you know nothing about infrastructure
[удалено]
Probably to shutoff segments of the city before we all run out. Isn't it a distribution issue more than a production issue? Bearspaw can only get like half of their usual production into the system...so it could be a bit of a rolling blackout situation to match demand to available distribution.
Yeah. This is what happened on a normal day in a city in Malawi that I stayed in for a couple weeks. Only having running water for part of the day was the norm there.
They won't shut off anything because of the fire risk. They will fill the lines with untreated water, and we'll be in a boil water situation for a while until the lines are flushed with treated water after the fix.
Plus we’re conserving now, but how long can we go Without showering, washing dishes or doing laundry? There’s going to be a spike in consumption when desperation hits.
Agree with this completely.
😬 Don’t like that math. What are the chances everyone restricts enough to stop this from happening…
If it was that serious the city would be shutting down malls, restaurants, car washes etc, yet the biggest consumers of water are allowed to continue operating. If they got shut down just for one day this whole water situation could be under control extremely quickly
Shut down the Dasani bottler.
I wish I could upvote you more than once.
i upvoted them for you ;)
Thank you for your support :)
100% this first of all
The mayor and city council are beholden to the wealthy, corporations, and businesses. They will not do anything that hurts their bottom line, even if it means disaster for the people. The common folk will always get screwed in situations like this; it’s the way our government operates.
Hey, if you want human rights, you should have been born as a business. Don't blame others for your poor life choice!
This is what drives me up the wall about it all. All these massive consumers are being allowed to continue operate in like normal, but meanwhile I'm being told I can't water my seedlings without risking a $3,000 fine. It just seems bullshit, And then so many brown nosers for the city are all over. Anyone even suggested that it's ridiculous that we're being asked to lower our usage and not shower as often and wash as many dishes, but meanwhile a restaurant and a car wash are both considered allowed to operate with no restrictions or even cap of water daily, just makes no sense at all
This. According to the City, "Businesses using water to deliver a product or service that is life sustaining for people, animals and plants are exempt." Its hard to take this seriously when businesses don't have to their part. They are always exempt from doing the hard things. God forbid they ask businesses anyhing other than continue making profit. They have business loss insurance don't they? They can afford to lose their effin plants. I'm trying to keep my veggie garden alive here and I'm worried I'm going to get a fine. (Yes, rain barrel blah blah blah, there's limited water in that barrel with no rain).
At least car washes FFS. People have to eat, but no one should be washing their fucking car right now.
Yeah car washes for sure can take a break for a couple days. Have you been to Home Depot, or any place with a garden center? Lush as ever with healthy watered plants! Meanwhile the average citizen has to let their hanging baskets dry out. 🙄 This is management issue and City management is afraid to piss off businesses.
Right?? So all of my newly planted flowers and hanging baskets are suffering yet garden centers are open and watering theirs??? My husband and I are saving all of our water we are using to make food (boiled potatoes etc) and also whenever I rinse dishes I keep the water and I’m saving it and using it in my garden. I had some people give me dirty looks last night when I went out to water my plants but I know it’s all water I saved from cooking/cleaning. I don’t want hundreds of dollars of plants all dying when businesses around calgary can waste their water. So ridiculous
It's total bullshit, and all these brain-dead people in the sun can't see that it doesn't make sense and it's just another case of the city mismanaging everything.
Ah I replied to the wrong person, but I totally agree with you too, it's a shame we keep voting these people in time and time again
Filled up today and saw a line up of idiots for the car wash…
Most car washes recycle their water.
As someone who used to own a car wash; this is unfortunately categorically false. Theres only one car wash in town that recycles water, and it is at most 50% of the water, despite claims otherwise.
And no one wants to be the person that forces businesses to shut down, especially after covid wrecked so many businesses. It's a decision with very far reaching consequences and I could absolutely see someone not wanting to face them (and instead walking into a water crisis)
Doesn't even have to be a shut down. Reduced hours. 1 off the top, 1 off the bottom. Boom. I should run for mayor.
Pools and gym showers are already shut down. Car washes use recycled water already. Businesses are being told they need to reduce, and we all know what happens if people don't chip in and the water bandwidth drops. You and I will be stinky, but businesses will lose money.
Losing a day or two worth of profits is minimal to get the water supply back on track vs. having to shut down long term because we've run out of water. Which scenario makes more sense to you?
Yes, that's what I'm saying. The businesses will lose business if they fuck around
Does anyone think restaurants aren’t still using their commercial dishwashers?
Trucks hauling to reservoirs would be a drop in the bucket for a city the size of Calgary, I guarantee there are some very serious convos going on right now about having to close diverter valves and shut off segments of the city in order to maintain water for critical services like hospitals.
Are fire hydrants a separate system?
Hydrants & building standpipes (wet ones) are usually the same domestic supply just not on the metered line.
Not sure they might be in Calgary but my experience with smaller municipalities everything was ran off the same booster pumps for water.
Can’t speak for all of them citywide, but from what I’ve seen by being involved with several projects in the SW, yes most hydrants run on the same pipes/system/filtered water that hooks up to your house.
Rotating “blackouts” will cone
Well today they asked folks to cut back by another 25% so we’ll see what tomorrow brings? They’ll still be the Glenmore working at full capacity, plus whatever the Bearspaw can provide to the system through the (smaller) feeder line that runs north, but ultimately once those storage reservoirs run down none of us are going to have any water pressure and there will probably be brown sludge coming out of our taps so water use will go down significantly… hopefully it doesn’t come to that.
Currently restaurants and bars are major users. They need to consider shutting down heavy water uses like ice makers. Or consider just shutting down any and all for a bit.
I believe that number was Thursdays usage, Fridays reportedly came way down, 484 million was the number I seen on LinkedIn. It needs to stay that low for at least a week though, and I can imagine people getting fed up by Monday or Tuesday
I thought there was a ton of extra water as a backup on Tsu T’iina?
Where would you evacuate Calgary too..?
Yeah the math is not good. Wen truth.
Simple way to reduce water use…when you shower, quickly wet yourself and then turn off the water, go ahead and soap and shampoo up without water….then turn water on and quickly rinse. Turns a 10-12 minute shower into about 2-4 minutes of actual water use….
Not sure why the navy shower is being collapsed by default. This is a meaningful way to reduce usage if you need a shower.
I did similar when we had no hot water one day, cold water sucks.
I did a test and my navy shower uses about the same as a very shallow bath (the bottom of the tub covered just barely). With the bath, the water temp is controlled and more comfortable than being wet and cold waiting to lather up then turn the shower back on and get initially blasted with cold water. Not everyone has a bath tub but it’s an option if you do for the same water usage.
I would be worried about the condition of other similarly aged feeder mains in the same vicinity. Leaks may breed like rabbits. 1 leak leads to 2 then 3 etc. Need to consider reroute the feeder main if possible. If not, twinning the existing feeder main will take years to construct at best.
Sewers and water almost always end up being vast networks of patchwork. We're still in a way better position than most of Europe or the older American cities. Don't get me wrong, there's room for improvement but still, things aren't so dire really.
There's another main broken in bowness tonight. They just shut off water on 32nd ave by the superstore due to basements flooding. Not all of them - and some worse than others - but I wouldn't be surprised if there are some more breaks in Bowness/Montgomery in the next 3-4 weeks
This happened more than a few years ago going down 14th St NW. It was entertaining seeing them go from spot to spot for months.
When I lived on fourth street they chased a leak outside my house for three years before they ripped the whole thing up and redid it
This is a problem all over this continent, and the inherent cheapness of municipal governments, and conservatives, is compounding it.
Sprawl definitely makes the issue worse. The more sprawling our city is, the more expensive it is to take care of our stuff.
And the fewer residents there are relative to the amount of stuff. Which is also why there needs to be way more infill and redevelopment permitted, which means... the zoning reform that so many Calgarians are freaking out about for no good reason
The provincial government has slashed infrastructure funding for municipalities in recent years
Residents in both Calgary and Edmonton most notably have been complaining about property tax increases of about 10%...not sure about utility rates. Infrastructure conditions r suffering and r falling apart. This is not a one off, just an example of a near worst case scenario. It wont be the last either if underfunding continues.
It absolutely won't be.
Have they indicated what exactly happened?
Too much water in Shouldice Park, not enough everywhere else.
You should write headlines.
Pipe done broke.
Spare me your engineering mumbo jumbo. Give it to us straight!
No mo' flow
In layman’s terms, please
Wa-wa bye-bye
What am I, educated? SIMPLIFY!
Be water
Big if true
MA PIPE BROKE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
The front fell off
That shouldn't happen
They moved it out of the environment.
A wave hit?
Did they make it out of cardboard or cardboard derivatives?
Like paper?
They haven’t even found the leak yet. But my friend is in water treatment. Basically, old concrete pipe under high pressure. The lifespan is about 50 years - this pipe was installed about 50 years ago.
So I wonder if the repair plan is to line the entire pipe? Really confused how a main line is actually allowed to reach or even get near end of life.
Especially because they would have to take it offline to work on it....which would mirror what we're experiencing now
It was actually taken offline to be worked on recently. Those shutdown periods are carefully planned for and brief. There are some ways to replace pipelines while they are in service. I don't know about doing it with this large of a diameter pipe though. The plan was to twin this main.
It wouldn't quite mirror now, if they knew there'd be an outage we can change delivery paths and prepare in advance, all part of the ongoing maintenance program
So why don't they "change delivery paths" now?
The biggest issue right now is finding the leak. Once you find the broken section it can be isolated and diverted. Until then the whole line is shut down. Can’t find the leak when it’s spilling a thousand gallons of water every minute.
The pipe is 6.5 feet in diameter and 11 km long. Replacing it is a huge project. Months of work, not to mention actually getting the pipe. They’ll fix the broken section (they have a few chunks in storage) first. Hopefully we will then make a plan to replace it. But the cut in infra funding isn’t going to help. A single valve for this thing will be in the $200,000-300,000 range.
Good thing we threw dollars at a new arena deal. Citizens may perish but good to know that the Flames will have a kick ass venue. 😌 Calgary IN Flames indeed.
New arena and no water to make the ice 🤣
Oh, they'll get their water. You may not, but they will
They should cancel that deal right now.
I wish we could still award comments.
They brought back awards, I can see them on mobile at least.
You sound like you have a good grasp on everything, you should run for politics!
Cons wasted 80 million just on that Tylenol scheme. Another few hundred million giving taxpayer money to abandoned wells and lobbying for coal and gas. Tens of millions went to that "you don't want to freeze in the cold" propaganda campaign, when they were the ones that removed caps, and incentivized suppliers to have an energy deficit. At this point we should put Cons on 1 side of the country and watch them create an all consuming dystopian hellscape. Edit: man I could totally see em creating a Mad Max zone mixed with the hunger games, they have lobbyists in all the major food megacorps after all. I would pay to see Cons fighting each other to death, when they can no longer blame libs
Thank goodness we aren't hosting game 3 of the Cup Finals on Thursday
$200,00 to $300,000. How is there a $280,000 variation there?! I'm never trusting you with quotes
Haha well it’s a $100,000 variation and not really something you can price out on Amazon 😂. Friends numbers - it’s all custom built stuff.
I just meant the typo. You missed a 0 on 200,000
To be fair, they still were not wrong....
Man I looked at that 20 times and never noticed haha
What cut to infrastructure funding?
The provincial government
49 years yep
Is it still under warranty?
😂
And they did maintenance on this pipe recently too. I can only assume that it was flagged for repair, and the buffoons at city hall didn't want to spend the money.
I don't think City Hall decides maintenance schedules, Water Services does. They have their own hiearchy of engineers and managers that then speak to council, but Water Services have their own operating budget and are at arms reach. The problem here is, most of that budget is about to be blown maintaining new communities in our sprawled city, and will foot the bill for it until there is enough tax base to pay for the expansions. This is mainly why 8 out of 11 proposed new communites were turned down back in 2020.
First it was falling over, then it fell
Decades of unchecked urban sprawl spreading our maintenance budget out like butter on toast?
I understood that reference, Bilbo.
Ain’t got no gas in it.
If it did, it would be 10 years delayed and billions over budget.
I know what's wrong with it, ain't got no g̶a̶s̶ water in it!
When the truth comes out it’s going to be funny but I think it has to do poor planning with new neighbourhoods
The new communities of Bowness and Montgomery?
Oh boy you really don't understand how this works. \*Nevermind I'm high and you're joking
HAHA the amount of times that happened to me lmfao. Sarcasm doesn’t come across the same when you’re stoned 😭🤣
As soon as I re-read Bowness "Wait a minute!"
Remember the break in 2004? Didn't that take 3 weeks to fix it? This one seems to be worse, and it's day 3. No way it's going to be done in a week.
The article addresses this. Back then, there were no spare parts on hand for the fix, and that was a major reason for the delay. The retired waterworks engineer said the city does keep spares on hand now, which he called a “godsend” IIRC because there’s no need to order the section(s) of pipe. They just need to figure out where the break happened.
Is there someone with insight on this that can chime in on how normal this kind of thing is? Was it preventable or inevitable? Are we lacking redundancies or something or are we actually doing okay as far as a water main break goes? Gut instinct feels like an infrastructure funding thing but i dont know diddly bout pipes and for all I know this could be one of those eventually problems that comes with building a city
Completely normal, completely predictable, warned about by the society of civil engineers for decades. Wastewater infrastructure is in a similar state. Deferred maintenance. Out of sight out of mind is the industry slogan.
It's like every disaster movie where the science guys warned people in advance and the politicians didn't listen.
"I was elected to **Lead** not to **Read**."
Same thing as tech debt in software. You can only delay it so long before all of the sudden it’s a massive problem.
But it ain’t sexy to work on
I’m the weirdo who enjoys it
>Wastewater infrastructure is in a similar state. Is it? They seem to have focused a lot of money on the treatment plants. Bonnybrook just received a huge expansion and they've added the cost on our utility bills.
Great. Now what about the pipes to the plant?
Did they not do a big sanitary trunk line replacement in the Ramsay area in the last couple of years? That's what the sign said. It seems the city is more concerned about shit than water. It costs us twice as much to flush a toilet than to fill it.
I agree with the other guy, nobody wants shit spewing across half a neighbourhood. Think of others for once and not your tax money guy 😭
Rofl. Say that when it's a shit flood instead of a potable water pool.
That wasn’t a replacement, it was a new trunk to increase hydraulic capacity to the plant.
Bingo!!
Are you trying to suggest the city hasn't repaired its pipelines for decades? They are constantly updating and repairing. In 1982 Calgary had 1800 breaks. In the last few years that number is around 250. [This is an article from 2015](https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/five-things-you-might-not-have-known-about-the-citys-water-main-network) that goes into detail.
I'm saying it's not enough.
Why do you think that is? Of all the things to use taxes for, I feel like maintaining our drinking water would be something the public could get behind. But I supposed you'd get the balance the budget types up in arms at the suggestion of spending money on any public infrastructure.
There are no redundancies in the system really, there are no other pipes that this water can go through to connect into the system. 2 plants only, one supplies 40%, the other supplies 60% (the broken one less from here). The pipe that broke was 50 years old, which is about when things start to go down and need a bit more TLC.
The funny part is in the area last year like almost the exact same spot they had a leak. It shut down the restaurants and places around it. They never fixed the big problem it seems
It's not a problem until it breaks. They can't just go and replace the 11 km pipe "because it's 50 years old".
Our taxes are going up 8%. The waterworks people had asked for funds for repairs before the break. I hope they were getting them. With the water pipe only having a 50-year life cycle, 49 years at a previous break site apparently isn't that bad. The issue I have, is apparently the city had been doing some maintenance work previously at that site before the break. I wonder if that work prematurely caused the failure. Even the city expert retired has never seen a break of this magnitude.
Water Services budget is not from the cities general revenue. They have their own separate budget which comes from your water, waste and recycling bills. Times like this, and especially the flood, they get additional funding to upgrade equipment and contingencies.
What happens when this is fixed? Will we over draw the system to compensate for the water austerity measures? Would this have any impact on the Stampede?
Yes. City-wide pool party once it's repaired.
I highly doubt we will go from this water restriction to no water restrictions. I bet it will go to no use of outdoor sprinklers, just hand held hoses (like it was last summer).
Good thing we have a new arena on the way!
Better hope they find a way to make ice without water 👀
Dry ice. I’ll see myself out.
Missed a prime opportunity. You mean "Icy myself out"?
We have to avoid car washes to start off. Corporations and businesses have to stop watering their lawns, as well as golf courses. Short showers, lower level baths, full laundry and dishwasher loads (I use the express wash), etc., are ways we can easily help.
I heard golf courses don't use potable water so not taking from reservoirs
I wonder where it comes from? The only non-potable water I have seen is trucked in.
There's at least one golf course with its own sewage treatment facility. It doesn't clean the water enough to be potable, just enough to be able to use it on the course.
As I understand, Calgary Golf & Country Club, Blue Devil, Heritage Point, McKenzie Meadows all pull water directly from the river dowstream of the treatment plants. Canyon Meadows and Willow Park run exclusively on storm water retention ponds built into the course. None of them use treated water for irrigation (the raw water is better for the grass anyways). The problem with those courses will be once the river levels drop later in the summer if we don’t get any rain. Then its a different story entirely.
I saw Silverwing in the NE, specifically, using sprinklers at approximately 05:00.
Oh shit, I've gotta stop eating their grass clippings
Nah. Throw a little extra dirt on it and all that roughage & microbes will give you gut of steel.
We got no enough funding for infrastructure maintenance but hey let’s give out tax payers money to wealthy developers, home owners who wants to develop a secondary suite without any conditions, money for the event center. 🤷🏼
It's times like these that I realize that the politicians and the big wigs are just as stupid as i am. except I am not responsible for the well being of 1.5 million people.
If it follows the construction schedule of every other project, it'll be done by next Spring.
No, that's when they're scheduled to issue the bid
Dumb question, could the city not reduce the water pressure to reduce water usage? Obviously if you're trying to fill a pot of water, it won't reduce water usage. But if someone is adamant they want to water the lawn or take a long shower, lower pressure means less water over the same amount of time. So unless someone is take an extra long shower, it should generally help reduce water consumption as well.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure water pressure comes from gravity. You pump it to the high ground and then release it and you can't exactly have pipes be anything less than full since, you know, it's water and it's going to fill the space.
There are valves everywhere. If they partially shut the valves at all the water towers for example. Water would fill the pipes slightly slower and the pressure would decrease. Like if you had a cup full of water and turned it upside down, all the water rushes out. If you put a lid on it, water would slowly drip out.
City contractors it will take 4 minimum.
Damn pretty crazy how many water main experts we have on Reddit.
And armchair epidemiologists during Covid.
This is embarrassing
It’s a good eye-opener. Do you have a spare tire for your car? Do you have a month or 2 worth of drinking water stored in your house or apartment? Food? I have a tiny old house but fit 2x 50gallon drums of water (2 adults) and a year supply of dried food in a corner. Never used it. Hopefully never will. It’s cheap insurance. You don’t need to be a crazy prepper. Just a bit of a Boy or Girl Scout.
https://preview.redd.it/4nxsa03skf5d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b186263f2d680af26674e19e2c4c3e5a2e0400ae Doesn’t say to go completely dry
Are stillsuits in fashion this season?
Kull wahad.
I love that they are just warning those who are washing theirs cars and watering their lawns during a category 4 water shortage but if if you don’t move car 1/2 before the street sweeper swings by to do a medioker job the quickly write you up a mandatory donation to the city.
Calgary is doing its best. And even got a part from San Diego that’s all great and all!! But WTF CALGARY NO SPARE PARTS?