Delayed inspections, risk of more ruptures: 5 takeaways from report on Calgary's water main catastrophe

An main(a) venire cover released its cover on the 2024 break away of the Bearspaw South feeder main Wednesday, amid the backdrop of a second catastrophic break of the same main last week.

While this latest break was not part of their review, the panel’s findings point to decades of passed-up opportunities to inspect the feeder main, despite the fact it was identified as being at risk of failure.

Here are some of the key takeaways. 

The report says the Bearspaw South feeder main was identified as vulnerable after the 2004 rupture of the McKnight feeder main in northeast Calgary, which used the same type of material: prestressed concrete cylinder pipe. (PCCP).

That break flooded McKnight Boulevard and temporarily left about 100,000 northeast residents without water.

The Bearspaw pipe’s age — it was installed in the mid 1970s — and design were also considered risk factors.

But those vulnerabilities were never addressed, the panel found, and three recommendations over five years to inspect the pipe (in 2017, 2020 and 2022,) were either deferred or redirected as the city focused on other priorities.

The report says infrastructure is lagging in many Canadian cities, with more than one-quarter of water mains across the country in need of repair.

But it says the risk is elevated in Calgary, due to a boom in population growth and higher maintenance costs associated with the city's low population density, where the system supports a sprawling city.

“The city was growing at a remarkable pace, and quite often, growth investments overtook some of the resilience and redundancy investments that should have been undertaken at the time,” panel chair Siegfried Kiefer told a news conference this week. 

The panel said the City of Calgary’s “risk tolerance has been too high for critical infrastructure."

“This is a staggering failure. It is the equivalent of a plane crash caused by a faulty part, and then refusing to replace the same part on identical aircraft,” Ward 12 Coun. Mike Jamieson said in a statement. 

But Kerry Black, associate civil engineering professor at the University of Calgary, said it is important not to point fingers.

“[These are] collective decisions where we are trying to prioritize what’s most important to the city," she said. “You can’t fix everything, so you prioritize the things that are the highest risk."

The panel also concluded another break could be very much in the cards, echoing what Mayor Jeromy Farkas has said that the feeder main is a “ticking time bomb” until it is replaced, . 

The report says the pipe’s condition continues to deteriorate, and that immediate measures should be taken. 

“The current Bearspaw feeder main is in a state of disrepair and no matter how much patching we do to it, it will continue to be unreliable,” said Kiefer. 

The feeder main should be maintained until it can be replaced, the panel said. Construction is underway to install a new steel pipe that will replace the concrete feeder main, a project set to be done by 2028.

After last week's break, city officials said work on that project is being accelerated. The panel wants that timeline sped up further to have the new steel pipe in place within 12 to 14 months, by early 2027.

Black says accelerating that project will not go unnoticed by residents.

“It causes a disruption and it costs a lot of money" she said. "Those are two things that no city council wants to engage in, but the reality is that’s where we’re headed."

Michael Thomson, the city's infrastructure services general manager, said the city is prepared to work at a pace it's never seen before in order to get the replacement done.

"Our risk tolerance and our urgency changed last Tuesday, and we have to move as fast as we can to get this new pipe installed, because that's what's going to reduce our vulnerability with this existing pipe," he told a council meeting.

The panel did not do a detailed cost analysis of its recommendations, Kiefer said. 

But he recommended sparing no expense. 

“In our world, we would typically unshackle our typical corporate practices around procurement, selection of contractors, if we had a crisis to deal with,” said Kiefer, who was previously CEO and president of Canadian Utilities, a subsidiary of ATCO.

“The real urgency is time. It’s not lowest cost, et cetera.”

Farkas said Wednesday he will push to meet the panel's timeline for the pipe's replacement, as well as its other recommendations, no matter the cost.

In 2024, the city said merely repairing the feeder main $38.2 million. The city has not provided a cost estimate to replace the major line.

One of the report’s key recommendations is to create a new water utility department. That department would be led by an executive who could be held accountable for any failures with the system.

In the longer term, the panel suggests that should be shifted to a standalone corporation, owned by the city. It drew a comparison to EPCOR, the utility company wholly controlled by the City of Edmonton.

The panel also suggests an independent advisory board that would provide oversight and deliver recommendations to council, to be replaced by a board of directors once the utility eventually becomes a municipally controlled corporation.

Calgary "is unusual amongst its peers with core functions split across departments, no segmented financial statements, and with only the CAO [chief administrative officer] accountable for end-to-end performance while providing oversight to approximately 60 other departments," the report said.

After the 2024 water main failure, the city implemented acoustic fibre optic monitoring to listen for wire snaps in the pipe. The sound of multiple snaps would warn officials that another break could be coming.

Why Calgary's acoustic monitoring didn't catch the latest water main break

But last week's second water main break showed the limitations of that method. There were no wire snaps heard in the two months leading up to the Dec. 30 break.

Thompson has described the most recent break as almost like a "zipper," splitting a clean line down the pipe.

The report says acoustic monitoring was the city's primary safeguard against another break.

But it notes that wire breaks only account for half of PCCP failures with known causes, and that other utilities have relied not just on acoustic monitoring but also other measures like electromagnetic inspections and robotic camera assessments.

Reporter / Editor

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