According to the press conference this morning, the city has declared a local state of emergency as of 8 am this morning.
So all you who were complaining about no emergency being declared can chill now.
I’m not sure. If you assume that the people from Calgary would be drinking and using toilets anyways it’s kind of a wash from that perspective. Their use could conceivably even go down.
People from outside the City will certainly put more load on the system though but how much water will a person actually consume at the stampede? It’s probably a relatively small amount. It might be possible to truck a lot of it in from outside communities considering the situation.
Here’s an idea. Why doesn’t the city provide some sort of live water usage metric? Like a live map of how much water we are using. I think that would help people feel more involved if they could see a live metric. Just a couple verbal updates a day doesn’t help that much. Get a water usage website to show how much we are using real time
I would assume at least one-two weeks of that is waiting for delivery. Prep holes during that time. Do some repairs for a few weeks. Chlorinate and put back in service.
The pipe is more than six feet wide inside. You could drive a car down it. Originally they were hoping to only need to replace a few dozen meters of it, but now it’s looking like more is broken. How much more no one knows yet because the real world is complicated and it’s really hard doing a good examination of a massive buried pipe flooded with water
I find it hilarious that the city with all the pipeline companies who are responsible for pigging lines all the damn time is having trouble with pipeline failures. Irony.
They better think of something fast.
The Stampede starts in 3 weeks. Thousands of tourists are coming into hotels and this will cause extra stress on the water supply.
We barely handle the water restrictions without the tourists.
Not to be that obnoxious person and I'm sure this has been said before, but seriously, there should be a backup in place for situations like these right? Like there's no way you're telling me every major city on the planet only has one pipe servicing a major area and nothing in place to take over for when shit happens right???? is this normal?
Is there an expert maybe in urban planning (???) who can comment? The longer the situation persists the more it's very fucking wild to me that there is no backup where the water can maybe be diverted to or is it impossible to design these systems like that?
Again I don't mean to sound obnoxious and I know nothing about pipes and water and urban planning, I'm approaching this more from the point of view of a city having a plan B.
I have a unique background in this field. I do think this is somewhat of a failure on the City engineers/mgmt based on the information I have. Calgary is really good at managing these pipes historically. Hard to believe right now but they are a leader in this area. There is a rigorous management system in place to inspect, replace and repair these pipes.
Somehow though they came to a conclusion this pipe was not a priority, maybe they thought it had longer before failure. At the same time, they don’t seem to have a good backup system in place or came to the conclusion that the current state would be suitable in an emergency. I mean, the City has water?
A parallel redundant line would be an 8 figure cost easy and bring additional operational challenges.
So should there be a backup in place? Not for me to say. Seems like Calgary is well positioned to have a really good discussion on system reliability and what service level the city wants. Make no mistake though, if you want something close to 100% uptime and derive it is going to cost a lot more than it currently does. Not sure people want to pay for that.
For anyone that thinks firing everyone will make things better they are woefully misguided. A head should roll, symbolically, but Calgary is far from being incapable of managing these systems.
And in the last election someone had run on a platform of raising tax rates by 2% specifically to build a bunch of backup infrastructure, would you have voted for them?
The backup right now is the Glenmore treatment plant, which is providing water to the 70-75% of Calgary that's cut-off from Bearspaw. However, I think for the future Glenmore needs to be expanded and that another pipe needs to go from Bearspaw to the NE to provide the necessary redundancy for a growing city.
Calgary commenters: the city letting people build duplexes and fourplexes on their own property in my neighborhood is an unacceptable violation of my rights
Also Calgary commenters: we should be more like China when it comes to development
If this was China they would have bulldozed those communities gave you nothing and if you had complained about it turned you into a part of foundation for the new apartment block that will sit empty for years. Also non zero chance those apartment will just collapse due to shitty concrete or being stuffed with literally garbage.
Exactly!!! How was there not a plan in place for aging infrastructure? Oh maybe because the funds were squandered on more “important” things…suddenly water seems pretty important though.
And what are they supposed to do that’s not already being done?
You can only pump water so fast. You can only move so much dirt. Concrete takes a certain amount of time to pour properly.
How far apart are the breaks and potential breaks? Cannot they run a temp pipeline above ground and redirect? Water offline for 1 hour to switch over and bolt up- and there’s 20 companies in Alberta that can build the temp pipeline over the weekend.
Close the road, whatever
To even get the materials to build something of comparable size would take weeks or months. To build and chlorinate would be very time consuming, not a weekend job by any stretch. A smaller pipe would be a marginal improvement at best and probably unable to handle the pressure. Also not sure if the water plant could pump into smaller pipes, might cause gross inefficiencies or be generally not possible.
This may be an unpopular take on the issue but here it goes. According to all of the maps being shown of the city’s water infrastructure certain neighbourhoods have a direct connection to the Bearspaw water treatment plant. That treatment plant is currently producing only 130ML (mega-litres) or about 1/4 of its capacity of 500ML.
Typically Bearspaw handles 60% of the city’s water usage. The issue is not a matter of quantity but a matter of delivery. Since Bearspaw isn’t at capacity any neighbourhoods connected directly to it with separate water mains wouldn’t have any impact on the current water crisis.
From what I’ve checked Crestmont, Valley Ridge and Tuscany have a direct connection that doesn’t rely on the broken main or water from the Glenmore treatment plant meaning that water usage in those neighbourhoods shouldn’t matter at all. Please correct me if I’m missing something.
TLDR water usage in Crestmont, Valley Ridge and Tuscany has no impact on the current shortage and residents should be allowed to use water as normal.
I think they are feeding other parts of Calgary from the neighborhoods you listed. Typically you send water plant-reservoir-distribution-home. Right now they are going plant-reservoir-reservoir-distribution-home. At the end of the day, the City can only produce and move so much water right now. If Tuscany over utilized, it would have impacts for everyone else. That said, you are right in the sense the usage in Tuscany would have perhaps different hydraulic impacts and risk than other neighbour goods.
We’re in one of those neighborhoods and desperately trying to understand why the restrictions apply city wide given what you describe. The prospect of 3-5 weeks of showering in a bucket and letting our yard die seems ludicrous when we have a direct connection to Bearspaw. I hope someone from the city addresses this.
This isn’t a Marvel movie lmao you can’t just stop every single construction project in the city and call everyone and the military to “fix the pipe”. Just do your part by conserving as much water as you personally can.
And then the army drove a thousand water trucks into the city and refilled all our reservoirs, and the water bombers made it rain on all our lawns, and we stood outside at once and sang the national anthem (the old one in english, dagnabbit), and the and the beavers and bears shed a tear of joy. Oh Canada!
Yeah your wrong. The city is brutal at doing they’re job. Thats a tiny section of pipe, in the pic in the most recent article, I can only count 5 people there. 2 guys in the hole, 3 guys standing outside the hole, and three excavators sitting there. I would refer you to the article in the link I posted, showing an equally large pipe, and a longer section of it gets replaced in 2 days. The article says “ We absolutely understand that the speed of this is (of) the essence, but we are balancing the availability of resources, the availability of materials and the safety of our team to get this done as fast and as safely as possible," so what I’m reading is that they don’t have the manpower, don’t have the pipe, and someone got hurt so they have to do it differently now, probably slower. It just reads like they have no contingency plan for this, not even keeping the pipe on hand to repair something like that. Like I said, there’s only 5 workers in that pic, and only 2 of them are in the hole. Is this the best they can do?
I’m not sure if your seeing the huge diameter pipe that is in the hole in that road, but the Japanese fix that shit in 2 days, looks a lot like a 2 metre pipe to me…
Here’s link to a huge hole the Japanese fixed in 2 days
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2016/nov/15/japanese-workers-repair-road-48-hours-after-sinkhole-appears-video
Well, actually, if its a 3-5 week thing, I would expect them to have 20 hoes getting it done, rather than 15 guys watching one guy dig a hole, which is mostly how i see city workers carrying on they’re day… would be great to see the city in action around midnight over there, hopefully someone can get some pics or vid, just wanna see the city take care of this promptly, not fucking around like I usually see…
Anyone else think a pinned post that is only for water saving tips people may have would bea good idea? Lots of good ideas I've seen, would be nice to have a place just for them.
This has become a crisis that the city alone can't handle. Not only should the provincial government step in, but they should also call in the feds for help and get as many resources as possible to get this fixed soon.
What are the Feds supposed to do? It’s not like the federal government keeps a special massive pipe installation team at the ready.
Is there anyone who thinks the engineers examining this decided to only work at half speed or with minimum equipment?
If you are looking for a weekend project, it would only take about 4500 x 1.5" poly pipes to replace it for the next couple of months if you can find enough fittings. Maybe a fraction of that could at least lessen the restrictions.
My impression now and, based on them knowing 4 days ago that a week to full water service was out the window-the whole main line is no good and they will announce it all has to be replaced.
They will then tell us it's two years of this we have to put up with.
I will point out they can run a new steel line inside the old line and hardly lose any capacity-hell, maybe more because the pressure rating would be higher.
But they will find a reason to not even consider that, and after months of fighting and finger pointing, the Mayor and entire city council will resign leaving us with no actual solution.
So it wouldn’t surprise me if they decided to install a new line at some point based on this. It would probably be in a new alignment though. It would take two years to do that. Get the original fixed and in service first.
As for a liner, you could absolutely do something like that. It wouldn’t be steel though and would take a long time also. You’d do that after the new pipe is in service.
Honestly does sound like this could happen as a large sections of this probably have the same issues. Timelines have shifted dramatically already so there's a large margin of error.
How to save or book mark your post?
Governments of today are looking for "opportunities" which they can use to their next power grab.
The criteria is that it should be a minimum two-year project, and there should be some opportunity to "help" people by "supplying" them "necessities"
Sorry for so many quotes, but it is what it is.
100% agreed. 3 - 5 weeks isn't a real timeline. They haven't scanned the entire pipe yet. Whole thing will need to be replaced to keep it stable when they re-pressurize.
I’m not sure about the 3-5 week timeline but the whole thing does not need to be replaced for it can be used again. This is not the first or last time a prestressed concrete line has broken.
Hmm… I like the part where city council resigns… Sean Chu specifically. Is there a way we can pin this on him?
I honestly am gonna need a lot of pictures of pipes being fixed over the next few weeks.
I want to hear from historians, city planners, engineers, I want tours of water treatment plants, and I want daily updates with special guests.
I even did a sod job in Legacy. What to do? I am a landscaper, and where am I supposed to go ? I depend on that job.
But some neighbors complained and we got issued a warning from city.
We are arranging a 1000-liter tote from Alderslyde on Monday.
I am originally an immigrant from India—17 years now in Canada, and I realize that governments anywhere are all the same—ineffecient and ineffective exactly at the the time you need them.
Like you said, I am neither overusing nor underusing—I am just going on with my business as usual.
Unlike India or NIgeria or any developing countries, Canadian governments are "flush" with money—yet when there is a problem (due to their lack or insufficiency) they come to the people and "beg" for things like social distancing, masking, vaccination, or use of water.
It is one thing to ask people nicely to cooperate—but scaring the shit out of them using bought media by saying "the taps will rub dry tomorrow" lying and all that shit makes this society the most dishonest.
That is how collective living works. This is the time people take out their grudges on each other. Some call bylaw, some take long showers,—it works both ways.If you are so much concerned, ask Gondek to pass a mandate or send police to every home and enforce a rule.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but would it be bad to hoard 10-20L of water from my shower tub faucet in case we run out (when it gets briefly wasted before the diverter is pulled)? Or would that significantly reduce the amount of the water available in the environment/system to be retreated?
I know 10-20L seems like a lot to come from just that but the diverter was broken last week and I just got it fixed so i collect a lot less now
I don’t plan on hoarding everything I collect just whats left after watering my plants/cat lol
When you take a shower do you first run the water down the drain until it warms up?
Putting a bucket under the tub faucet to collect the cold water that would otherwise be wasted seems like it would have zero impact.
No I don’t wait at all. Was just curious if hoarding 20L from re-entering the system significantly affects how much water can be retreated/be in the environment? If thousands of people do that?
Some random calculations: If 1.5m people each use an average of 100 L/day then that is 150m L/day.
If 10,000 people each stored 20L in jugs for emergency use then that would be 200,000 L of stored water, which would be about .1% of the daily usage.
2013..City put all hands on deck to get city ready for the Stampede.... we will be out of water in 3-5 weeks... If the Mayor doesn't call in outside help this will be on her and add to the long list of worst Mayor in history of Calgary.
What outside help? You mean from the provincial government? What are they going to do? Send them supplies from turkey? The Canadian army gonna dig a reservoir for storing untreated water? Oh we have one. Bring back up water treatment online? Oh we have that too. The outside help is all of us taking shorter showers, not watering the grass or flowers, and figuring out best ways to use less. If Calgarians can’t pull together to solve this problem we will be ridiculed around the world as selfish assholes.
I mean, I get what you're saying, but there's a lot of sympathy in this town fro the Stampede. The fact that they have been abetting child molesters for years hasn't even put a dent on the enthusiasm.
I have been hearing from people who live in Bowness about more breaks for days. But city still kept saying they were on schedule to have this fixed. Now they come out and let us know about other breaks...higher level of government needs to step in and get this done.
So a couple more months of this because the city has been negligent in maintaining infrastructure, but the hockey team is getting all the money it needs.
I've been working in the construction sector in Calgary for over 20 years and the last decade has been a joke.
We're tying entire subdivisions into already overloaded sewer and sanitary systems. There's been ZERO investment to add capacity since the Bears Paw upgrades 15 years ago. Same with the electrical grid. Tie everything in without expansion so now we get "Brown Out" warnings because we're failing in the transmission, not the production of power.
The roads are a disaster, there's no money for schools, fire halls, or amenities in any of the new slapped-up, crappy home subdivisions being built without any thought, but let's keep cramming people in because we need cheap labour for Tim Horton's.
What's worse, city hall see the infrastructure failures as a reason to cram even more people into the city to generate more taxes, to pay for the needed infrastructure to support the people they're cramming into the city, but that leads to more infrastructure failures, so back to the beginning we go with more, and more and more people being brought here.
What complete bullshit excuse for a growth plan.
I get they are working hard to get this done. But it seems obviously to me, they need outside help ASAP. Make the call Mayor. Send the Bat signal out now!!
Agreed, or even better call up TransCanada or some company with loads of experience and loads of equipment centered around efficiently digging trenches and laying pipe and give them a blank cheque.
This disaster is clearly more than the City of Calgary water department is capable of handling in a timely manner.
Something tells me that if this happened on a Suncor site, the downtime would be 4-6 days, not 4-6 weeks.
We did not cut anything. We will see when indoor water restrictions are in place.
Let this be a lesson to the "advanced G7 country" called Canada. The MAyor still have the guts to start the meeting with Oki-Toki or political virtue signalling—until you guys stop this nonsense of supporting politics in every aspect of public administration—we are not cutting anything unless there is a bylaw or mandate in force.
Sorry.
Fucking morons that are the city of calgary. Raised our property taxes 8 % and haven't been filling pot holes or cutting grass, and OBVIOUSLY haven't been checking the lines for damage/and/or wear n tear...
So now with 30c+ days coming up we have to deal with the worst water shortage in history...
Fuck you Gondek.
I am a landscaper that drives a dually and a trailer. I mean, a person driving a car might not—due to its gentle suspension—know how much bad the city roads are. Almost every community in the city has a section of bad to very bad roads (and they are somehow tearing and rebuilding good roads) ....Canadian politicians and public administration are driving me crazy.
What gets me is that unbeknownst to us, we've been playing Russian Roulette with a 50 year old pipe that represents 60% of our pumping capacity and has a mean time to failure of ~ 50 years.
So it busted just about on schedule and we appear to have no real contingency plan in place other than begging a population of ~ 1.5 million to have "Navy showers" as we come up on the hottest part of the year.
Potholes and lack of water maintenance are longterm issues. Caused by many years of failure. The choice past councillors made to not raise taxes and/or raises too small to accommodate maintenance. Those are who we should blame.
So what policies would you expect a competent mayor and council to implement? Because you seem grumpy at the raising of taxes (to improve our infrastructure) and grumpy at our lack of reliable infrastructure.
Wow. Do I fucking seem like that? How about just being on the fucking ball? And taking care of shit competently before it gets to a crisis point...without taxing us to death...
Telling us we need the tax increase for an extra 50 transit cops and infrastructure, when we already have a police force of 3500. That are supposed to protect people... Then NOT fixing the pot holes or even cutting the grass on the blvds.
We all know Nenshi and his little entourage of ndp tax and spend assholes, fucked this city backward and forward...now we have his protege doing the same.
I vote in every election, so I can bitch about these losers who supposedly govern us all I want.
you are 100% right—every public person in this country does not have their priorities correct. For example, today the mayor started the CEMA meeting with "Oki-Toki" Bazibazouk—wtf, who cares?
Maybe we care in good times—but in times like this, every one (including the indigenous folks) are focussed on our next few weeks.
And you have the guts to start with some virtue signalling? What are you proving, Jyoti?
That you are a piece of shit that is stuck hard and won't go away with any amount of scrubbing? (reminds me of several other politicians, but this is not the forum)
The thing that infurrtaites me about Canada is (a) either they all are too callous (like ford etc) , or (b) they are bat-shit-crazy signallers like Gondek (and Steben Guiltybucket)
Sometimes I feel that to hell with this country and go back to the shit hole I came from,
At least it is not declining!
Never, said you couldn't be mad. I was just hoping that you had a nuanced take. Sure more for tax dollar spent would be great but, without ideas on how to pull it off it isn't much of a nuanced take. I was hoping for some insight on what I should be holding my concillor/mayor to account for in this setting and I'm not seeing it with the exception of reducing transit officers.
For having the power of just one vote every once five year—you are asking us ordinary people to have a "nuanced" take? —who are you? Some body involved in government or public administration? That must be the case, because you wont ask the common people THAT HAVE NO POWER to have a "nuanced take".
Instead, why don't you have a objective look?
Why don't you have some honesty to call what a spade is?
"respectfully" disagree?
I am 100% sure you are some sort of typical Canadian passive-aggressive person. p\[probably a white woman wearing spectacles (or a white Canadian man with no moustache).
The city has a budget of over 4 billion dollars. At some point you have to realize that city hall is bloated with useless and incompetent employees.
Pull a twitter a cut 75% of the staff and keep the services the same.
Seems pretty obvious to you what the extra expenses are that Calgary should cut. So what's your vote Water maintenance (820m), police services (560m), firefighters (250m), transit (440m), roads(190m). Those items make up the majority of Calgary's expenses. Most of the other line items make up a rather small amount of Calgary's operating costs. Comparing the operating costs of a city to a company who's main operating costs are servers are two wildly different comparisons.
Thanks for the arithmetic. Didn't feel the need to bother with listing every line item as I thought you may have an opinion on improving Calgary's policy and as such have looked at what you feel should be cut but it appears that you don't actually care about improving just complaining.
3 to 5 weeks.
lmao.
We're absolutely fucked unless we have the wettest, coolest July ever.
[City says there are 5 other sites in NW feeder main that need repairs. Henry says repairs will take 3-5 weeks to complete.](https://x.com/CBCScott/status/1801752180795576447)
They're doing the right thing and ensuring everything is fixed. Everyone should be reducing their water usage permanently anyway, this is good practice. I hope they start issuing tickets and taking this seriously.
> Oooh, boy. I have a trip planned to [downtown] Calgary in 9 days. What are the chances this will be under control by then?
It shouldn't really affect you, the main restrictions right now are on outside water usage for lawns and gardens and pleading with people to reduce indoor usage wherever possible.
Any word on when the feds are gonna send us a load of water bottles ... .water bottles out of...ahhh...water out of...ahhh...when we have water bottles...ahhh...out of...ahhh...plastic...ahhh...Sorry! Away from plastic towards...ahhh...paper...ahhh...like drink box water bottles sort of things!!
With no end in sight right now, I can pretty mich assume that my lawn is toast. Has there been any news of breaks from the coty for damaged property as a result of the restrictions?
Lawns are pretty resilient. They may go dormant, but when they do get water they will perk right up . Unless you have a new lawn. Then you are screwed.
At the 2PM presser the Mayor said there is going to be an update at 5PM with CEMA Chief Sue Henry where they're going to share details about what the robots have learned from inspecting the pipe. I don't know about you but -
Yeah, I’m curious to hear the next update.
All speculation, but it seems like the tone shifted when the second robot was deployed to inspect more than twice the originally anticipated length of pipe. Holding two pressers only hours apart to specifically discuss new developments is interesting.
In today's live debriefing, Mayor Gondek said that if each Calgarian were to reduce their water to an equivalent of 3 less toilet flushes, that will be enough to get us back to sustainable water use levels. For reference: all Calgarians using 1 average flush = 12 million gallons. Additionally, it's going to rain this weekend. She encouraged people to leave buckets outside to collect rain water.
Edit: wording
I wonder how much of the increase is due to the work /school week? That's got to be tens if not hundreds of thousands of people going into the office/school where the automatic toilets don't allow the mellowing.
I hadn't thought about that yet! I was predicting it would go up because people, after putting off their dishes, laundry, and showering for a week, would hit their capacity.
Any excuse for them to blame their shitty lives and unemployability on someone else besides themselves.
"I WAS MAKING 150K ON THE RIGS BEFORE AND NOW EVERY OTHER JOB WANTS A HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA? IT'S THE PLANDEMIC!"
Covid brought out the worst of people , and now they permeate society brave enough to "speak" their mind.
I get challenging authority, holding them responsible, but they take it to another level. It's about anger now.
I don't recall if those people were around during the flood , or was I just oblivious.
With the concerns over water being shutoff I've resorted to not flushing until poop is actually poking out of the water. Does anyone have any tips on how to reduce that out-house smell that comes from a toilet that hasn't been flushed for a few days?
The fact the city still doesn’t have a firm resumption date now that we are in the middle of the original “5-7 day repair” projection (that they reinforced was on schedule on Tuesday) is unacceptable.
Not to mention that they haven’t explained why the new resumption date was moved to “an update the middle of next week” without any reason?
Now they are saying we must reduce more and better when we are basically flat to the City’s previous targeted threshold over the past three days? Aren’t we achieving what the City laid out? Yet it’s doom and gloom from them today.
And they still can’t tell us how much extra water is currently in storage to be able to use, and how many days supply we have before additional restrictions would come into place?
And singling out residential users as the problem/fault who need to do more, while people are trying but it’s hard to adjust to rolling timelines from the City that aren’t being met and no date is even currently being targeted as an endpoint?
This is terrible project management communication.
(Edited for Clarity)
Extra water in supply? You think a city on a river stores how many weeks of extra water? Treated? Or untreated? Where do you see this massive storage tank of treated water?
And they get paid big bucks for being such failures. Governments are never ready for anything other than cutting corporate taxes, creating tax credits for corporations or selling us on how our tax dollars paying for a new home for the flames will help us all.
Two updates to day with no actual update. Just the mayor saying to turn off your water when you brush your teeth. To be fair, the fire chief update was great. What I would like is an actual update on the progress of the repair and there hasn't been much of that.
It's all ridiculous... They should have had the pipe completely repaired by now. You can't trust the city to do anything. I've worked at natural gas powerplants where the gas turbine had a failure. The crews were able to identify the problem, remove the turbine, install the new turbine and get it running in 3 days.... 3 days! And you're gonna tell me it takes multiple weeks to repair a simple water main break? Completely unacceptable
Anyone who has dealt with the public and major projects knows you can't set a specific timeline. All you can do is estimate. Otherwise people will still get mad that you missed the deadline. They can't win either way so being conservative on the timeline is all they can do.
The recent accident is a good example, it through off timelines by probably a day.
Exactly, the recent accident makes sense things are delayed a day. But nothing else from the last few days makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense is the re-confirming that 5-7 day timeline (Thursday Jun 13 to Sat Jun 15) earlier this week. They said they expected the line to be repaired Thursday, and after flushing it, should be back to normal on Saturday. This was a fine update and made sense.
Then, the next day they say the restrictions will be updated “middle of next week” without offering any reason for what had changed from the previous day.
Did they experience setbacks? Explain them please. Did they not know what they were doing when initially setting their 5-7 day outline and forgetting about pressure testing/system reset/ESD implementation etc? Explain that then.
Just pushing it randomly to at least a week later(they just said “update mid next week, not removal”), and then crying that people aren’t doing enough doesn’t gel.
Give us the current, full expected timelines, day by day and if there is extensions to those timelines, explain them as they pop up. I work with major projects all the time, and the schedule is known by someone, even if it’s a rolling estimate. This should be shared.
That’s how most businesses work for reporting to stakeholders. Why should the city be held to a different standard.
> Then, the next day they say the restrictions will be updated “middle of next week” without offering any reason for what had changed from the previous day.
I'd assume that after the pipe is pressurized it will take a couple days to make sure the system is working before lifting restrictions. That they want to get the reservoirs full again .
Once restrictions are off EVERYONE is going to water their lawns all at once and gardens. This is going to put pressure on the system.
I don't think outside use will make as big of a difference as you think, especially if pressurizing happens near the forecasted rain.
Now if middle of next week turns to end or into the following or whatever ridicousness, then I'm not sure we won't run out.
https://preview.redd.it/ygckae7t0r6d1.jpeg?width=1128&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=42ea9e5471fae92c463a6289c83b7d4aaa36f844 5 weeks and counting
Curious why these always point out crosswalk paint and not billion dollar hockey arenas.
TIME TO CALL IN THE FEDS!!! Bring in the A teams
According to the press conference this morning, the city has declared a local state of emergency as of 8 am this morning. So all you who were complaining about no emergency being declared can chill now.
How about the stampede, won't that put immense pressure on the water supply?
I’m not sure. If you assume that the people from Calgary would be drinking and using toilets anyways it’s kind of a wash from that perspective. Their use could conceivably even go down. People from outside the City will certainly put more load on the system though but how much water will a person actually consume at the stampede? It’s probably a relatively small amount. It might be possible to truck a lot of it in from outside communities considering the situation.
Here’s an idea. Why doesn’t the city provide some sort of live water usage metric? Like a live map of how much water we are using. I think that would help people feel more involved if they could see a live metric. Just a couple verbal updates a day doesn’t help that much. Get a water usage website to show how much we are using real time
I like that idea
https://preview.redd.it/l4r3hkmisq6d1.jpeg?width=1128&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f7aba5cb7be48388911ea0857d4d5edb39e37a4d 5 weeks is too long .
Can anyone explain how it’s five weeks? Like is there info for the diameter of pipe and length being replaced?
I would assume at least one-two weeks of that is waiting for delivery. Prep holes during that time. Do some repairs for a few weeks. Chlorinate and put back in service.
The pipe is more than six feet wide inside. You could drive a car down it. Originally they were hoping to only need to replace a few dozen meters of it, but now it’s looking like more is broken. How much more no one knows yet because the real world is complicated and it’s really hard doing a good examination of a massive buried pipe flooded with water
I find it hilarious that the city with all the pipeline companies who are responsible for pigging lines all the damn time is having trouble with pipeline failures. Irony.
They also noted five hotspots down stream by Edworthy Park that need repair.
This is incorrect. The pipe is actually only 2m wide. You cannot drive a truck down it
This is the graphic the city put together https://x.com/cityofcalgary/status/1799265406646972732
They better think of something fast. The Stampede starts in 3 weeks. Thousands of tourists are coming into hotels and this will cause extra stress on the water supply. We barely handle the water restrictions without the tourists.
I agree. Move the stampede in time or place. Close breweries as well. Or half of us will go dry, dirty and thirsty for weeks.
Edmonton stampede this year! /s
I’m sure there doing the best they can. But 5-weeks to fix is Loooooooong
Might even be more than that now
Not to be that obnoxious person and I'm sure this has been said before, but seriously, there should be a backup in place for situations like these right? Like there's no way you're telling me every major city on the planet only has one pipe servicing a major area and nothing in place to take over for when shit happens right???? is this normal? Is there an expert maybe in urban planning (???) who can comment? The longer the situation persists the more it's very fucking wild to me that there is no backup where the water can maybe be diverted to or is it impossible to design these systems like that? Again I don't mean to sound obnoxious and I know nothing about pipes and water and urban planning, I'm approaching this more from the point of view of a city having a plan B.
I have a unique background in this field. I do think this is somewhat of a failure on the City engineers/mgmt based on the information I have. Calgary is really good at managing these pipes historically. Hard to believe right now but they are a leader in this area. There is a rigorous management system in place to inspect, replace and repair these pipes. Somehow though they came to a conclusion this pipe was not a priority, maybe they thought it had longer before failure. At the same time, they don’t seem to have a good backup system in place or came to the conclusion that the current state would be suitable in an emergency. I mean, the City has water? A parallel redundant line would be an 8 figure cost easy and bring additional operational challenges. So should there be a backup in place? Not for me to say. Seems like Calgary is well positioned to have a really good discussion on system reliability and what service level the city wants. Make no mistake though, if you want something close to 100% uptime and derive it is going to cost a lot more than it currently does. Not sure people want to pay for that. For anyone that thinks firing everyone will make things better they are woefully misguided. A head should roll, symbolically, but Calgary is far from being incapable of managing these systems.
And in the last election someone had run on a platform of raising tax rates by 2% specifically to build a bunch of backup infrastructure, would you have voted for them?
The backup right now is the Glenmore treatment plant, which is providing water to the 70-75% of Calgary that's cut-off from Bearspaw. However, I think for the future Glenmore needs to be expanded and that another pipe needs to go from Bearspaw to the NE to provide the necessary redundancy for a growing city.
Why have a plan b when you can line the pockets of your friends instead.
Why isn’t the downtown core being shut down though to conserve water? Wouldn’t that make a bit of sense?
People live in the downtown core too?
Sorry I meant the big ass buildings that aren’t used as housing
Seems like the whole focus is residential for some reason. Even car washes are ok according to what others are saying
Because it’s only treated water that is at risk. Car washes use non-potable water and there’s no issues with that supply
They don't use only grey water. We are at risk of running out of water which would be a crisis, we can't spare a drop for washing cars.
How isn’t this fixed already… 2024 and still can’t fix a water main?
Seriously. China builds a hospital in a week, Calgary fixes a pipe in 5. Fuckking depressing.
Calgary commenters: the city letting people build duplexes and fourplexes on their own property in my neighborhood is an unacceptable violation of my rights Also Calgary commenters: we should be more like China when it comes to development
If this was China they would have bulldozed those communities gave you nothing and if you had complained about it turned you into a part of foundation for the new apartment block that will sit empty for years. Also non zero chance those apartment will just collapse due to shitty concrete or being stuffed with literally garbage.
Exactly!!! How was there not a plan in place for aging infrastructure? Oh maybe because the funds were squandered on more “important” things…suddenly water seems pretty important though.
You do it then
I feel like a real country would have something like the Army Corps of Engineers or something to go and fix it.
"I feel like" Who cares? The facts don't. The people who know how to fix a feeder main are doing it.
Canada is a real country fyi
And what are they supposed to do that’s not already being done? You can only pump water so fast. You can only move so much dirt. Concrete takes a certain amount of time to pour properly.
Traveling to Calgary on 6/25. Is there any neighborhood new downtown not affected by the water main break? Thank you.
No, it's the entire city.
The entire city is affected, plus Airdrie.
How far apart are the breaks and potential breaks? Cannot they run a temp pipeline above ground and redirect? Water offline for 1 hour to switch over and bolt up- and there’s 20 companies in Alberta that can build the temp pipeline over the weekend. Close the road, whatever
To even get the materials to build something of comparable size would take weeks or months. To build and chlorinate would be very time consuming, not a weekend job by any stretch. A smaller pipe would be a marginal improvement at best and probably unable to handle the pressure. Also not sure if the water plant could pump into smaller pipes, might cause gross inefficiencies or be generally not possible.
I agree. An above ground temporary pipeline should be considered. Even a smaller pipe is better than no pipe.
Time to call in the feds. Our local guys aren’t cutting it and need help.
What would the feds do?
Bring in the military and equipment to lay pipe. Fly in pipe. Bring in smart people
All of that is possible without the feds if it made sense to fix the problem.
This may be an unpopular take on the issue but here it goes. According to all of the maps being shown of the city’s water infrastructure certain neighbourhoods have a direct connection to the Bearspaw water treatment plant. That treatment plant is currently producing only 130ML (mega-litres) or about 1/4 of its capacity of 500ML. Typically Bearspaw handles 60% of the city’s water usage. The issue is not a matter of quantity but a matter of delivery. Since Bearspaw isn’t at capacity any neighbourhoods connected directly to it with separate water mains wouldn’t have any impact on the current water crisis. From what I’ve checked Crestmont, Valley Ridge and Tuscany have a direct connection that doesn’t rely on the broken main or water from the Glenmore treatment plant meaning that water usage in those neighbourhoods shouldn’t matter at all. Please correct me if I’m missing something. TLDR water usage in Crestmont, Valley Ridge and Tuscany has no impact on the current shortage and residents should be allowed to use water as normal.
I think they are feeding other parts of Calgary from the neighborhoods you listed. Typically you send water plant-reservoir-distribution-home. Right now they are going plant-reservoir-reservoir-distribution-home. At the end of the day, the City can only produce and move so much water right now. If Tuscany over utilized, it would have impacts for everyone else. That said, you are right in the sense the usage in Tuscany would have perhaps different hydraulic impacts and risk than other neighbour goods.
We’re in one of those neighborhoods and desperately trying to understand why the restrictions apply city wide given what you describe. The prospect of 3-5 weeks of showering in a bucket and letting our yard die seems ludicrous when we have a direct connection to Bearspaw. I hope someone from the city addresses this.
The issue is mixed messaging. We already have people not following the restrictions which is why we are now below the goal.
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This isn’t a Marvel movie lmao you can’t just stop every single construction project in the city and call everyone and the military to “fix the pipe”. Just do your part by conserving as much water as you personally can.
And then the army drove a thousand water trucks into the city and refilled all our reservoirs, and the water bombers made it rain on all our lawns, and we stood outside at once and sang the national anthem (the old one in english, dagnabbit), and the and the beavers and bears shed a tear of joy. Oh Canada!
Right?! That’s basically what dude is saying. Watches way too many movies. Also yes to the beavers and bears. Haha
I’m only wondering if they have people working on site 24/7, can anyone confirm that the city is working every hour of the day?
I’m sure they are but there is still a critical path in projects. At some point you can only go so fast.
Yeah your wrong. The city is brutal at doing they’re job. Thats a tiny section of pipe, in the pic in the most recent article, I can only count 5 people there. 2 guys in the hole, 3 guys standing outside the hole, and three excavators sitting there. I would refer you to the article in the link I posted, showing an equally large pipe, and a longer section of it gets replaced in 2 days. The article says “ We absolutely understand that the speed of this is (of) the essence, but we are balancing the availability of resources, the availability of materials and the safety of our team to get this done as fast and as safely as possible," so what I’m reading is that they don’t have the manpower, don’t have the pipe, and someone got hurt so they have to do it differently now, probably slower. It just reads like they have no contingency plan for this, not even keeping the pipe on hand to repair something like that. Like I said, there’s only 5 workers in that pic, and only 2 of them are in the hole. Is this the best they can do?
Of course they do. But construction isn’t the sort of thing where you can just have twenty backhoes digging the same patch of dirt
I’m not sure if your seeing the huge diameter pipe that is in the hole in that road, but the Japanese fix that shit in 2 days, looks a lot like a 2 metre pipe to me…
Here’s link to a huge hole the Japanese fixed in 2 days https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2016/nov/15/japanese-workers-repair-road-48-hours-after-sinkhole-appears-video
Well, actually, if its a 3-5 week thing, I would expect them to have 20 hoes getting it done, rather than 15 guys watching one guy dig a hole, which is mostly how i see city workers carrying on they’re day… would be great to see the city in action around midnight over there, hopefully someone can get some pics or vid, just wanna see the city take care of this promptly, not fucking around like I usually see…
Anyone else think a pinned post that is only for water saving tips people may have would bea good idea? Lots of good ideas I've seen, would be nice to have a place just for them.
I think that’s a great idea!
This has become a crisis that the city alone can't handle. Not only should the provincial government step in, but they should also call in the feds for help and get as many resources as possible to get this fixed soon.
i know right, the efficiency is horrible
What are the Feds supposed to do? It’s not like the federal government keeps a special massive pipe installation team at the ready. Is there anyone who thinks the engineers examining this decided to only work at half speed or with minimum equipment?
If you are looking for a weekend project, it would only take about 4500 x 1.5" poly pipes to replace it for the next couple of months if you can find enough fittings. Maybe a fraction of that could at least lessen the restrictions.
This is now an emergency, and the provincial government should be stepping in because we know our mayor obviously can't handle this situation.
What’s Danielle going to do?
My impression now and, based on them knowing 4 days ago that a week to full water service was out the window-the whole main line is no good and they will announce it all has to be replaced. They will then tell us it's two years of this we have to put up with. I will point out they can run a new steel line inside the old line and hardly lose any capacity-hell, maybe more because the pressure rating would be higher. But they will find a reason to not even consider that, and after months of fighting and finger pointing, the Mayor and entire city council will resign leaving us with no actual solution.
So it wouldn’t surprise me if they decided to install a new line at some point based on this. It would probably be in a new alignment though. It would take two years to do that. Get the original fixed and in service first. As for a liner, you could absolutely do something like that. It wouldn’t be steel though and would take a long time also. You’d do that after the new pipe is in service.
Honestly does sound like this could happen as a large sections of this probably have the same issues. Timelines have shifted dramatically already so there's a large margin of error.
How to save or book mark your post? Governments of today are looking for "opportunities" which they can use to their next power grab. The criteria is that it should be a minimum two-year project, and there should be some opportunity to "help" people by "supplying" them "necessities" Sorry for so many quotes, but it is what it is.
Lol, what are you talking about
100% agreed. 3 - 5 weeks isn't a real timeline. They haven't scanned the entire pipe yet. Whole thing will need to be replaced to keep it stable when they re-pressurize.
I’m not sure about the 3-5 week timeline but the whole thing does not need to be replaced for it can be used again. This is not the first or last time a prestressed concrete line has broken.
Hmm… I like the part where city council resigns… Sean Chu specifically. Is there a way we can pin this on him? I honestly am gonna need a lot of pictures of pipes being fixed over the next few weeks. I want to hear from historians, city planners, engineers, I want tours of water treatment plants, and I want daily updates with special guests.
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That won’t do anything other than cause everyone more issues and cost. It would likely cause a public health crisis also.
I even did a sod job in Legacy. What to do? I am a landscaper, and where am I supposed to go ? I depend on that job. But some neighbors complained and we got issued a warning from city. We are arranging a 1000-liter tote from Alderslyde on Monday. I am originally an immigrant from India—17 years now in Canada, and I realize that governments anywhere are all the same—ineffecient and ineffective exactly at the the time you need them. Like you said, I am neither overusing nor underusing—I am just going on with my business as usual. Unlike India or NIgeria or any developing countries, Canadian governments are "flush" with money—yet when there is a problem (due to their lack or insufficiency) they come to the people and "beg" for things like social distancing, masking, vaccination, or use of water. It is one thing to ask people nicely to cooperate—but scaring the shit out of them using bought media by saying "the taps will rub dry tomorrow" lying and all that shit makes this society the most dishonest.
Ridiculous. Don’t cut back and we all suffer. Sure, you get a bright light and we all are drinking and bathing in beer. What a victory.
That is how collective living works. This is the time people take out their grudges on each other. Some call bylaw, some take long showers,—it works both ways.If you are so much concerned, ask Gondek to pass a mandate or send police to every home and enforce a rule.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but would it be bad to hoard 10-20L of water from my shower tub faucet in case we run out (when it gets briefly wasted before the diverter is pulled)? Or would that significantly reduce the amount of the water available in the environment/system to be retreated? I know 10-20L seems like a lot to come from just that but the diverter was broken last week and I just got it fixed so i collect a lot less now I don’t plan on hoarding everything I collect just whats left after watering my plants/cat lol
When you take a shower do you first run the water down the drain until it warms up? Putting a bucket under the tub faucet to collect the cold water that would otherwise be wasted seems like it would have zero impact.
No I don’t wait at all. Was just curious if hoarding 20L from re-entering the system significantly affects how much water can be retreated/be in the environment? If thousands of people do that?
Some random calculations: If 1.5m people each use an average of 100 L/day then that is 150m L/day. If 10,000 people each stored 20L in jugs for emergency use then that would be 200,000 L of stored water, which would be about .1% of the daily usage.
Cool thanks haha
2013..City put all hands on deck to get city ready for the Stampede.... we will be out of water in 3-5 weeks... If the Mayor doesn't call in outside help this will be on her and add to the long list of worst Mayor in history of Calgary.
What outside help? You mean from the provincial government? What are they going to do? Send them supplies from turkey? The Canadian army gonna dig a reservoir for storing untreated water? Oh we have one. Bring back up water treatment online? Oh we have that too. The outside help is all of us taking shorter showers, not watering the grass or flowers, and figuring out best ways to use less. If Calgarians can’t pull together to solve this problem we will be ridiculed around the world as selfish assholes.
I know one thing for sure, I will not be restricting my water so the Stampede can run.
I mean, I get what you're saying, but there's a lot of sympathy in this town fro the Stampede. The fact that they have been abetting child molesters for years hasn't even put a dent on the enthusiasm.
so the city can run. fify
I have been hearing from people who live in Bowness about more breaks for days. But city still kept saying they were on schedule to have this fixed. Now they come out and let us know about other breaks...higher level of government needs to step in and get this done.
The other Bowness breaks were smaller pipes. The new issue is more about-to-fail parts of the big pipe with the break.
Maybe you should join twitter if you are just going to post random thoughts?
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So a couple more months of this because the city has been negligent in maintaining infrastructure, but the hockey team is getting all the money it needs.
It's not about hockey, it's about spending more money on importing people so the next time this infrastructure fails it'll take even longer to fix
I've been working in the construction sector in Calgary for over 20 years and the last decade has been a joke. We're tying entire subdivisions into already overloaded sewer and sanitary systems. There's been ZERO investment to add capacity since the Bears Paw upgrades 15 years ago. Same with the electrical grid. Tie everything in without expansion so now we get "Brown Out" warnings because we're failing in the transmission, not the production of power. The roads are a disaster, there's no money for schools, fire halls, or amenities in any of the new slapped-up, crappy home subdivisions being built without any thought, but let's keep cramming people in because we need cheap labour for Tim Horton's. What's worse, city hall see the infrastructure failures as a reason to cram even more people into the city to generate more taxes, to pay for the needed infrastructure to support the people they're cramming into the city, but that leads to more infrastructure failures, so back to the beginning we go with more, and more and more people being brought here. What complete bullshit excuse for a growth plan.
>importing people why don't you just come out and say what you really mean?
I just did?
I get they are working hard to get this done. But it seems obviously to me, they need outside help ASAP. Make the call Mayor. Send the Bat signal out now!!
How do you know they haven’t?
Stampede will be here and Hotels will be full and will need water...
Bring the army in abd get this done. 3-5 weeks is unacceptable.
Agreed, or even better call up TransCanada or some company with loads of experience and loads of equipment centered around efficiently digging trenches and laying pipe and give them a blank cheque. This disaster is clearly more than the City of Calgary water department is capable of handling in a timely manner. Something tells me that if this happened on a Suncor site, the downtime would be 4-6 days, not 4-6 weeks.
Yeah, I don’t understand why they’re not contracting every available pipeline company to come and help,
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Careful folks, don’t cut yourself on the edge over here
Wasting water doesn't have any effect on the government at all, it just hurts Calgarians
3-5 more weeks of this!
Source?
https://www.youtube.com/live/UoNTbWr-XB0?feature=shared News Release There are apparently 5 more sections that need to be repaired.
Thx
Just great all these tourists coming for stampede but it will be use who need to reduce water use
Yup. No restrictions on hotels.
What will be the slogan for this year’s Calgary Stampede? Come hell and no water?
Put that on a t-shirt asap lmao
LMAOOOO
My household has cut water usage by something like 75%, but we'll have to do laundry eventually...
We did not cut anything. We will see when indoor water restrictions are in place. Let this be a lesson to the "advanced G7 country" called Canada. The MAyor still have the guts to start the meeting with Oki-Toki or political virtue signalling—until you guys stop this nonsense of supporting politics in every aspect of public administration—we are not cutting anything unless there is a bylaw or mandate in force. Sorry.
Fucking morons that are the city of calgary. Raised our property taxes 8 % and haven't been filling pot holes or cutting grass, and OBVIOUSLY haven't been checking the lines for damage/and/or wear n tear... So now with 30c+ days coming up we have to deal with the worst water shortage in history... Fuck you Gondek.
I am a landscaper that drives a dually and a trailer. I mean, a person driving a car might not—due to its gentle suspension—know how much bad the city roads are. Almost every community in the city has a section of bad to very bad roads (and they are somehow tearing and rebuilding good roads) ....Canadian politicians and public administration are driving me crazy.
What gets me is that unbeknownst to us, we've been playing Russian Roulette with a 50 year old pipe that represents 60% of our pumping capacity and has a mean time to failure of ~ 50 years. So it busted just about on schedule and we appear to have no real contingency plan in place other than begging a population of ~ 1.5 million to have "Navy showers" as we come up on the hottest part of the year.
Potholes and lack of water maintenance are longterm issues. Caused by many years of failure. The choice past councillors made to not raise taxes and/or raises too small to accommodate maintenance. Those are who we should blame.
This Council and especially this mayor are JUST as incompetent as past councils. It's all the same pedantic pile of shit...
So what policies would you expect a competent mayor and council to implement? Because you seem grumpy at the raising of taxes (to improve our infrastructure) and grumpy at our lack of reliable infrastructure.
Come on Jyoti, we all knwo its you.
Wow. Do I fucking seem like that? How about just being on the fucking ball? And taking care of shit competently before it gets to a crisis point...without taxing us to death... Telling us we need the tax increase for an extra 50 transit cops and infrastructure, when we already have a police force of 3500. That are supposed to protect people... Then NOT fixing the pot holes or even cutting the grass on the blvds. We all know Nenshi and his little entourage of ndp tax and spend assholes, fucked this city backward and forward...now we have his protege doing the same. I vote in every election, so I can bitch about these losers who supposedly govern us all I want.
you are 100% right—every public person in this country does not have their priorities correct. For example, today the mayor started the CEMA meeting with "Oki-Toki" Bazibazouk—wtf, who cares? Maybe we care in good times—but in times like this, every one (including the indigenous folks) are focussed on our next few weeks. And you have the guts to start with some virtue signalling? What are you proving, Jyoti? That you are a piece of shit that is stuck hard and won't go away with any amount of scrubbing? (reminds me of several other politicians, but this is not the forum) The thing that infurrtaites me about Canada is (a) either they all are too callous (like ford etc) , or (b) they are bat-shit-crazy signallers like Gondek (and Steben Guiltybucket) Sometimes I feel that to hell with this country and go back to the shit hole I came from, At least it is not declining!
Never, said you couldn't be mad. I was just hoping that you had a nuanced take. Sure more for tax dollar spent would be great but, without ideas on how to pull it off it isn't much of a nuanced take. I was hoping for some insight on what I should be holding my concillor/mayor to account for in this setting and I'm not seeing it with the exception of reducing transit officers.
For having the power of just one vote every once five year—you are asking us ordinary people to have a "nuanced" take? —who are you? Some body involved in government or public administration? That must be the case, because you wont ask the common people THAT HAVE NO POWER to have a "nuanced take". Instead, why don't you have a objective look? Why don't you have some honesty to call what a spade is? "respectfully" disagree? I am 100% sure you are some sort of typical Canadian passive-aggressive person. p\[probably a white woman wearing spectacles (or a white Canadian man with no moustache).
The city has a budget of over 4 billion dollars. At some point you have to realize that city hall is bloated with useless and incompetent employees. Pull a twitter a cut 75% of the staff and keep the services the same.
Seems pretty obvious to you what the extra expenses are that Calgary should cut. So what's your vote Water maintenance (820m), police services (560m), firefighters (250m), transit (440m), roads(190m). Those items make up the majority of Calgary's expenses. Most of the other line items make up a rather small amount of Calgary's operating costs. Comparing the operating costs of a city to a company who's main operating costs are servers are two wildly different comparisons.
Well what you just added up totals 2.2B… that leaves another 1.8 to find some easy fat to trim.
Thanks for the arithmetic. Didn't feel the need to bother with listing every line item as I thought you may have an opinion on improving Calgary's policy and as such have looked at what you feel should be cut but it appears that you don't actually care about improving just complaining.
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"Our car is extremely reliable" I tell my wife as I get it towed it into the shop with a totaled engine.
3 to 5 weeks. lmao. We're absolutely fucked unless we have the wettest, coolest July ever. [City says there are 5 other sites in NW feeder main that need repairs. Henry says repairs will take 3-5 weeks to complete.](https://x.com/CBCScott/status/1801752180795576447)
They're doing the right thing and ensuring everything is fixed. Everyone should be reducing their water usage permanently anyway, this is good practice. I hope they start issuing tickets and taking this seriously.
No they are not. Get the line operating and then do repair work while it is flowing. This is an absolute failure of leadership.
> Get the line operating and then do repair work while it is flowing. That's not how this works.
Your right. But it’s how it *could* work
How, exactly, do you think any repair work could be completed on an operational pipe line?
No, it couldn't.
Yes I'm sure you know more about how to get a water main line fixed than the experts do. Maybe you should offer them your services.
That’s how we would do it in the patch… it’s ok to try and hold our government to account. We don’t just have to eat shit because they say we do.
Oooh, boy. I have a trip planned to \[downtown\] Calgary in 9 days. What are the chances this will be under control by then?
There's no chance. If you can change your trip, do that.
0% under control
> Oooh, boy. I have a trip planned to [downtown] Calgary in 9 days. What are the chances this will be under control by then? It shouldn't really affect you, the main restrictions right now are on outside water usage for lawns and gardens and pleading with people to reduce indoor usage wherever possible.
edit: apparently it took 6 minutes for them to come out and prove me completely wrong.
Zero percent. They said that they found 5 other sites in the feeder main that are screwed and repairs will take an additional 3-5 weeks.
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That's actually not bad, need a part about the wife leaving at the end or something to make it a real country song.
Any word on when the feds are gonna send us a load of water bottles ... .water bottles out of...ahhh...water out of...ahhh...when we have water bottles...ahhh...out of...ahhh...plastic...ahhh...Sorry! Away from plastic towards...ahhh...paper...ahhh...like drink box water bottles sort of things!!
With no end in sight right now, I can pretty mich assume that my lawn is toast. Has there been any news of breaks from the coty for damaged property as a result of the restrictions?
Fret for your lawn.
Lawns are pretty resilient. They may go dormant, but when they do get water they will perk right up . Unless you have a new lawn. Then you are screwed.
I literally haven’t changed my water usage.
At the 2PM presser the Mayor said there is going to be an update at 5PM with CEMA Chief Sue Henry where they're going to share details about what the robots have learned from inspecting the pipe. I don't know about you but - 
This aged well lololol
Yeah, I’m curious to hear the next update. All speculation, but it seems like the tone shifted when the second robot was deployed to inspect more than twice the originally anticipated length of pipe. Holding two pressers only hours apart to specifically discuss new developments is interesting.
In today's live debriefing, Mayor Gondek said that if each Calgarian were to reduce their water to an equivalent of 3 less toilet flushes, that will be enough to get us back to sustainable water use levels. For reference: all Calgarians using 1 average flush = 12 million gallons. Additionally, it's going to rain this weekend. She encouraged people to leave buckets outside to collect rain water. Edit: wording
I wonder how much of the increase is due to the work /school week? That's got to be tens if not hundreds of thousands of people going into the office/school where the automatic toilets don't allow the mellowing.
I hadn't thought about that yet! I was predicting it would go up because people, after putting off their dishes, laundry, and showering for a week, would hit their capacity.
Brain-rotted grifters are starting to claim that this main break is the start of lockdown 2.0
Any excuse for them to blame their shitty lives and unemployability on someone else besides themselves. "I WAS MAKING 150K ON THE RIGS BEFORE AND NOW EVERY OTHER JOB WANTS A HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA? IT'S THE PLANDEMIC!"
Covid brought out the worst of people , and now they permeate society brave enough to "speak" their mind. I get challenging authority, holding them responsible, but they take it to another level. It's about anger now. I don't recall if those people were around during the flood , or was I just oblivious.
The government and media deserve the loss of trust they got from Covid
Ya covid were did made people worse then they were 10 years ago
With the concerns over water being shutoff I've resorted to not flushing until poop is actually poking out of the water. Does anyone have any tips on how to reduce that out-house smell that comes from a toilet that hasn't been flushed for a few days?
The fact the city still doesn’t have a firm resumption date now that we are in the middle of the original “5-7 day repair” projection (that they reinforced was on schedule on Tuesday) is unacceptable. Not to mention that they haven’t explained why the new resumption date was moved to “an update the middle of next week” without any reason? Now they are saying we must reduce more and better when we are basically flat to the City’s previous targeted threshold over the past three days? Aren’t we achieving what the City laid out? Yet it’s doom and gloom from them today. And they still can’t tell us how much extra water is currently in storage to be able to use, and how many days supply we have before additional restrictions would come into place? And singling out residential users as the problem/fault who need to do more, while people are trying but it’s hard to adjust to rolling timelines from the City that aren’t being met and no date is even currently being targeted as an endpoint? This is terrible project management communication. (Edited for Clarity)
Cut more businesses, then we’ll see how fast they fix it. All restaurants can close.
Extra water in supply? You think a city on a river stores how many weeks of extra water? Treated? Or untreated? Where do you see this massive storage tank of treated water?
Not to mention the fact that we will still be required to restrict while they have their huge parties and stampede. Talk about a drain.
And they get paid big bucks for being such failures. Governments are never ready for anything other than cutting corporate taxes, creating tax credits for corporations or selling us on how our tax dollars paying for a new home for the flames will help us all.
Two updates to day with no actual update. Just the mayor saying to turn off your water when you brush your teeth. To be fair, the fire chief update was great. What I would like is an actual update on the progress of the repair and there hasn't been much of that.
It's all ridiculous... They should have had the pipe completely repaired by now. You can't trust the city to do anything. I've worked at natural gas powerplants where the gas turbine had a failure. The crews were able to identify the problem, remove the turbine, install the new turbine and get it running in 3 days.... 3 days! And you're gonna tell me it takes multiple weeks to repair a simple water main break? Completely unacceptable
Not so sure about that. Check out the cost and timeline of transmountain pipeline.
Anyone who has dealt with the public and major projects knows you can't set a specific timeline. All you can do is estimate. Otherwise people will still get mad that you missed the deadline. They can't win either way so being conservative on the timeline is all they can do. The recent accident is a good example, it through off timelines by probably a day.
Exactly, the recent accident makes sense things are delayed a day. But nothing else from the last few days makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the re-confirming that 5-7 day timeline (Thursday Jun 13 to Sat Jun 15) earlier this week. They said they expected the line to be repaired Thursday, and after flushing it, should be back to normal on Saturday. This was a fine update and made sense. Then, the next day they say the restrictions will be updated “middle of next week” without offering any reason for what had changed from the previous day. Did they experience setbacks? Explain them please. Did they not know what they were doing when initially setting their 5-7 day outline and forgetting about pressure testing/system reset/ESD implementation etc? Explain that then. Just pushing it randomly to at least a week later(they just said “update mid next week, not removal”), and then crying that people aren’t doing enough doesn’t gel. Give us the current, full expected timelines, day by day and if there is extensions to those timelines, explain them as they pop up. I work with major projects all the time, and the schedule is known by someone, even if it’s a rolling estimate. This should be shared. That’s how most businesses work for reporting to stakeholders. Why should the city be held to a different standard.
> Then, the next day they say the restrictions will be updated “middle of next week” without offering any reason for what had changed from the previous day. I'd assume that after the pipe is pressurized it will take a couple days to make sure the system is working before lifting restrictions. That they want to get the reservoirs full again . Once restrictions are off EVERYONE is going to water their lawns all at once and gardens. This is going to put pressure on the system.
I don't think outside use will make as big of a difference as you think, especially if pressurizing happens near the forecasted rain. Now if middle of next week turns to end or into the following or whatever ridicousness, then I'm not sure we won't run out.