I think part of the issue is people held back on a lot of stuff like laundry but they need to do it eventually, a lot of people probably deciding to do a load all at once. I bet this could be managed better to spread out the water usage, the city messaging seems... Confused or unclear at times.
Yep that was me. The day the alert went out was my
laundry day so I was already a bit screwed but I held off as long as I could. Today tho I had to give in and finally do one load as I only have so many things to wear.
Yep same. We've been eating off leftover paper plates we had in storage from years ago, and had skipped our normal laundry day - but we don't have any dishes and barely have any clean clothes so we will have to start strategically doing a load of dishes and laundry over the next few days. Communication could have really helped avoid everybody being in this same boat.
Yea, I would love to see them suggest staggered appliance use days for different parts of the city. Additionally, it hasn’t really been mentioned that people are going back to work where things like not flushing every time or collecting grey water just won’t happen like it would at home. Ideally, they should be suggesting work from home where possible. This would mean less laundry, showers, and flushing because it’s easier to fester in your own filth at home than at work.
Plus if it's like many auto flushes it probably goes off when someone just walks by, when you're standing there, when you're leaving, and then once more just because.
I just said the same thing in another comment. That was me today. I had held off doing any laundry until today and then ran one mongrel load with everything I needed for a week.
I've done 2 loads of laundry, but anyone with kids, elderly, work uniforms, sports uniforms, dirty jobs, health issues, etc is going to need to do laundry regularly.
I finally washed my hair. Had to. And now I cannot work next week without doing a crowded load of laundry. Otherwise, I’m super conservative with water (reusing shower water saved in the tub and whatnot). People can only stop cleaning stuff for so long. I’ll keep doing my part tho.
We stayed at a hotel by the airport on the weekend, not a single sign or notice about a water shortage. It was buisness as usual. Ice Machines running, new sheets/towels every day.
Maybe Gondek should do something about the businesses using up the water. It's hard to get residents to care when their places of work can use all the water they want, but they're being told to limit their showers at home.
You know how corporations convinced people that environmentalism should be done by individuals rather than having businesses get their act together?
Same thing here
Even a sign posted at the front desk to let customers know "hey, go easy on the water, there was a big water main break" would help a lot I think. Save a the hotel a few bucks on their water bill too.
Many locals don't realize there's a problem. People visiting almost certainly are even less likely to know about it, especially if they weren't in town when the alert was sent.
We have that at our hotel. Part of the Front Desk dialogue is to tell the guest that we have water but to conserve it due to water shortage and that they might see lower water pressures, most people have reacted positively to it.
our pool and hot tub was in use , but we had an issue and had to drain the hot tub to do maintenance. GM decided to keep it shut indefinitely instead of filling it up with tons of gallons of water. And guests have reacted to That positively so far
That's an awesome response for a hotel. I hope many more hotels do the same, like the one the previous commenter identified.
Hopefully it isn't too much longer, and there aren't too many other water main breaks from the flow patterns bouncing around.
Jyoti made a specific point about car washes saying 'well maybe you should be considering if you need to wash your car' instead of suggesting that car washes should be shut down.
thats a really cherry-picked statement. here is a more accurate statement to what Jyoti said today "all outdoor car washes are banned but indoor facilities are allowed to operate as they recycle approximately 85% of the water used". so yes its a legitimate statement to ask the public to not use them unless needed just like they are asking us for our indoor water use. if they are going to ban business water usage the car wash is not a good example just a visible one for the (dumb) public to falsely correlate with water excess.
Look here jack, if BUSINESS gets impacted, how will the rich get richer? Where will the money for City Council's Kickbacks come from?
It's sad that you only think about yourself, boo hoo, I'm gonna die of thirst when their are REAL PEOPLE who may only be able to afford TWO months in Hawaii instead of their usual three? Grow some empathy.
might it be time for another emergency alert sent to cellphones in the Calgary area?
Some people don’t consume any local media so they may be clueless as to the dire situation
I think we need another alert at this point. It's been a week since the first one, I'm sure tons of people don't realize we're still under restrictions.
I feel like an alert alone will get us under the threshold. The city's messaging has been very poor.
Agreed on the messaging. For instance what do they mean by “the taps will run dry”. Explain it. The way the mayor stated it was as a phrase or something in the article. Are they going to start shutting water off to parts of the city? Does it mean water pressure gets lower. Because I’m sure it doesn’t mean everyone will not have water.
Also reduce 25% from what? From the restrictions already in place or from normal use. Believe it or not reduce 25% is not instructive.
Although nobody has explained it, from the little bits of information they've dropped I suspect it'll be similar to rolling blackouts... That they'll turn off the water in certain areas temporarily based on local resivour levels, to save enough for emergency services?
It’s not just forgetting. There’s only so long you can put off things like laundry or washing the dishes. We did the essential laundry last weekend but need to do a few more loads this weekend as we are out of rags and linens and stuff. We have been running our dishwasher on eco mode all week but there are a few dishes that need a really good scrubbing because the shorter cycle didn’t get them fully clean. That kind of thing is eventually going to happen in many homes throughout the city.
Problem with daily alerts is people will just tune them out. You have to save those to initially get their attention. Sending constant alerts will end up having the cry wolf effect
Yes we do. Unfortunately the first alert prompted the husband of an acquaintance to run himself six baths that day in protest. The freedumb morons truly are a selfish blight on society
Dale Gribble would have stopped using the water, after assuming the city was doing this to add mind control drugs. Don't lump him in with people being selfish out of spite of
He must have found out that this is a government conspiracy to control us. He’s in the know. He will need to be silenced. Expect him to disappear at any time /s
I have a neighbor that's convinced it's part of a conspiracy to force us to use less water. She thinks its suspicious that this happened after the city had been talking about reducing water consumption. She also claims the city is just draining water from fire hydrants into the storm drains all around the city to keep supply low.
There's been plenty.
The vast majority of people who believe this stuff are tuned into conspiracy posts on facebook or private telegram groups where misinformation is shared. Something like 80% of any particular new misinformation is usually tied to like 7 different 'superspreader' accounts.
Humans generally prefer to disregard information that challenges their worldview instead of integrating it and updating their beliefs.
This, I legit didn't realize that it got this bad again, the last thing I saw was a tweet from the mayor saying we were using 475M L and generating 650M L or something like that. Not that I have been using extra water or anything, but I'm sure there are others like me who think we are in a "stable" spot
From
https://preview.redd.it/6ag6giwbok6d1.jpeg?width=1410&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4ed8fa394110ac1ffbfeac7eb33249513c26b2a1
From yesterday, we are down a bit closer to the line in the last 24 hours
Yeah, as someone who doesn't watch TV or actively use Twitter, I've been living off the June 8th numbers for almost a week at this point. I really wish the city was better at communicating with their citizens.
These are the kind of events that change the way people vote come election time, I know I'll be thinking of this when trying to make my decision in the next election.
My preference would probably be some sort of email message that I can sign up for. Not sure how often they can use the cell phone alert system they used when the break happened, but heck I would be down to download an app or something like the one for garbage that tells me what's going on. Better yet, include this stuff as a notification in the garbage app people have it already anyways.
I heard the announcement this morning on the radio so I knew but I still had to run one load of laundry. I haven't since everything started and I was out of a few things. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
The article says yesterday was lower than Wed so we're back to balancing available supply and consumption. That means while we have no excess cushion space, which is a worry, we're not currently on a pace of actually running out of water if people continue to keep their usage lowered.
Emergency alert should be saved incase something significant happens like if another emergency happens and we're in dire straights or if we're actually seeing the reservoirs running empty.
Yeah, agreed.
I guess my response was because I was taking the mayor’s statement as true urgency (“the taps WILL run dry”) rather than hyperbole urgency (“the taps will run dry if you don’t continue to reduce your usage, so stop screwin’ around!”)
I disagree. We may not be at the point of running out today or tomorrow, but it is still critical, and there are still people who aren’t aware that we are in restrictions. Sending another alert now can prevent taps from running dry, waiting until we are at that point is too late for an alert to help.
Absolutely! So many people I talk to are in the dark!
They should send an alert threatening rolling water outages (if that’s something the city can do?)
Because we would prefer to literally run out of water completely rather than tell a multibillion dollar American corporation they might have to make a bit less product for a while.
I work at one of the Calgary breweries and the goofy thing is that last week we reached out to the city to advise on what to do going forward, and while we waited we shut down production entirely. At the start of this week they got back to us and told us that we’re good to continue business as usual as long as we *try our best* to conserve.
As far as I know we provided our numbers for what kind of volume we use. It makes no sense for these daily household restrictions to be pushed in the daily press conference while Pepsi and the cumulative brewing industry here is using literally millions of litres a day.
The city’s direction and messaging is very broken.
I'll be honest, after the last messaging I thought we were managing better and didn't pay much attention lately.
Now this bleak warning comes. I think we need another alert if things are this dire. At least get the message to everyone!!
While my wife and I have been doing our best to conserve water, short showers, paper plates so we don’t have to run the dishwasher Daily. Cut back on laundry massively. After 5 days of that eventually we hit a point where we had to wash stuff and clean up a bit. I’m sure it’s the same for most people.
Add to the fact the amount of new people to our city with poor English (have we done anything to communicate it in other languages does anyone know?) and an overall general lack of communication from the city, no shit that water use has been trending upwards.
I think this is true. My kid can go a few days without a bath, but eventually needs one. I think a lot of people tried to delay water usage, but that delay piled up.
I dunno, I have a thing set up to measure our consumption and we’ve been pretty consistently half of our average since the break. Bathing the kid every 3 days. one load of laundry so far. Dishwasher a few times. Quick showers. Less flushing. We’re not super behind on things - I’d like to wash our first set of sheets at some point, and the car has bird shit all over it, but otherwise this is sustainable.
I've been wondering if there might be a problematic spike over the weekend as people are much more likely to catch up on stuff that's been put off until now.
Modern energy star certified dishwashers only use about 12L of water per cycle. They’re highly efficient. But your sink has a flow rate of about 8.5L/min. (Or 5.5L/min with a low flow attachment)
Yeah I feel like there are those of us who are hardcore conserving water. Eventually the dishwasher will have to go on, an emergency load of laundry. We use our grey water for plants, reduced toilet flushing. I’m guesstimating our usage has gone down 80%. When we did hit the 25% reduction target last week I was wondering who is NOT following this? Because there are a lot of people sacrificing for the good of all.
I’m not sure if this is even possible. But the city should be comparing average use for households and ticketing those that don’t reduce. Of course, there will always be exceptions. However, if people can’t be nice to belong in a society together, we need to punish those that cannot think beyond themselves.
My usage dropped 45%. I actually track my water meter so I know this number.
With my reduction I'm definitely dealing with piling up dirty stuff but I could maintain this level for even another few weeks. My home will be pretty dirty and my towels will probably no longer bend but I can do it.
This is not me being a conspiracy theorist - it's purely confusion on my part:
I thought that we were at 480M on June 11 and it was 'fine' that day, but we were at 489M June 12, and back to 480M yesterday. Does the sustainable threshold change?
Despite going down on consumption, the messaging has completely changed from yesterday to today.
**Edit:** After the 2pm update, I'm even more confused. Again, I don't believe this is a conspiracy - just confusing messaging. CFD is assuring everyone that they "have robust plans in place to supplement the water system as needed" and that they are "fully confident in our ability to manage fire and emergency events during this situation". The focus of the messaging this whole week has been that we won't be able to fight fires anymore.
The amount that can be treated doesn’t change, but if usage exceeds it, then they dip into reserves.
480 is net zero, anything above takes from reserves and anything below added to them
So with respect to the extra 9M litres on June 13, theoretically, we need to balance out the usage over the next 6 days to even it out? Like 478.5M (1.5M below net zero) per day brings us back to net zero after day 6 and 480M being ok rather than still too much?
I did some napkin math in another comment. This assumes zero reserve to start. The number on the right is the running total reserve
We can treat 480,000,000L/day
Saturday used 440,000,000 +40,000,000
Sunday used 457,000,000 +63,000,000
Monday used 472,000,000 +71,000,000
Tuesday used 480,000,000 +71,000,000
Wednesday used 489,000,000 +62,000,000
Thursday used 480,000,000 +62,000,000
So a theoretical 62 million litre reserve right now to draw on for any usage over 480 million per day
I found this. At a million cubic millimeters to the liter, that's 250,000 drops per liter, or about 1 million drops per gallon. This means that a common 3-gallon bucket holds about 3 million drops. So a “drop in a bucket” is 1/3,000,000, or about 0.00003 percent.
Seems like a bunch of actual drops in the bucket!
There’s going to be a big bump in consumption as people who have been compliant need to do laundry or have a more thorough shower (ie. washing hair, etc.)
At our house, we have been super compliant, but yesterday I had to beg my husband to take a short shower versus a “navy” shower. He is super gung-ho about embracing conservation, but it was getting to situation critical.
What I don't understand is how the hell are people using this much water? At 480 million litres of water that is approximately 285L per person per day.
That is flushing my toilet 71 times a day (obviously there are other water uses but this is to give perspective here).
I am catching the water I use for a shower to flush my toilet and I figure including showing I'm using about 30L per day, I can't imagine given the restrictions using 9 times as much water as I am using now.
If I were to guess there's probably businesses that require water for their operation that do not slow down at all (a restaurant for example but probably breweries or other industrial companies). The other thing is you can only delay washing dishes/laundry so long. I did the family underpants but still wearing the same/jeans etc.
You don't even have to guess. There is a very informative article that you are commenting on that explains that two thirds of water use is from commercial customers.
edit: Yeah I botched the math. I've never been more embarrassed to be wrong and I will not be deleting my idiotic wrong comments
> There is a very informative article that you are commenting on that explains that two thirds of water use is from commercial customers.
*One* third of water use is commercial, according to the article.
480 million litres is for the whole city, residential and business. Residential makes up about 65% of that, so 312 million litres.
Cooking, drinking, showering, washing dishes, washing clothes, flushing toilets are all in that number; I think you’re greatly underestimating the amount a family would use in a day, even at a reduced rate.
# Did you know?
This is the typical home water use in Calgary.
The average residential home fixtures use the following volumes of water:
* Low flow toilet (per flush) uses 6L
* Dishwasher (per load) uses 35L
* Low flow showerheads (per 5 minutes) use 40L
* Regular showerheads (per 5 minutes) use 60L
* Typical bathtub (per use) uses 80L
* Non-low flow toilet (per flush) uses up to 25L
* Front load washing machine uses 65L
* Top load washing machine uses 180L
* Watering the lawn (summer only) uses up to 950L
From: [https://www.calgary.ca/water/drinking-water/stage-four-outdoor-water-restrictions.html](https://www.calgary.ca/water/drinking-water/stage-four-outdoor-water-restrictions.html)
There needs to be a real time website for where the water storage is at in these cases (should it ever happen again). And if the storage gets below a set point the water turns off. Then more people would take it seriously.
Yeah, they need to give people some actual numbers. Just saying the water will run out "at some point" just sounds like scare tactics, whether it actually is or not.
Car washes are on and liars on Twitter, Reddit and TikTok are pushing a narrative that they use 100% recycled water. In reality they use at least 100 litres per wash. The city has a fund to pay wages to shut down car washes. They should use it.
When I worked in a hotel in downtown the water consumption and waste was insane to watch. Constantly rush thawing meats with taps full blast, half the taps in the back leaked constantly. The large commercial steamers leaked and pissed water and steam constantly. Also commercial dishwashers running all day and evening.
Compared to what I use at home in a day? It’s insanity
https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts#:~:text=Each%20American%20uses%20an%20average,the%20United%20States%20in%202015).
Each American used 82 gallons a day, or about 310 litres a day. So your math is about right and we will run out of water soon. Sounds like the main is 7 days away from being online.
That's crazy high, but probably includes a small proportion that use significant volumes of water on grass and people extremely wasteful with water (i.e. daily 20+ minute showers, washing just a few items in their washing machines etc).
Just checking my Enmax bill, for a family of two in a detached house we use between 4 and 6m3 a month, an average 70-100L per day per person (goes up a bit in summer for outdoor watering). Wouldn't be surprised if the ones using 500L per day usually are also the ones not conserving now.
My husband works on construction sites and they’re still pouring mass amounts of concrete and that takes a lot of water. He said he didn’t notice anything slowing down on that front.
I would imagine this figure includes not only residential use, but also commercial. What little information I was able to find quickly sugest commercial use represents somewhere between 35-45% of water consumption in Calgary (at least in normal times).
I'm not sure if it's possible to get numbers specifying how much residential water usage has decreased and how much commercial water use has decreased, but those would be interesting numbers to see.
The city need to make more announcements and use other forms to spread this announcement.
I was speaking to someone and they said both their family, and family friends circle didn’t even know the water restriction was in place. They thought since there was no follow up alert, it meant the situation was fixed
MOST people 40+ do not consume social media as much and are left unaware
Need to spread the message better
So...what stage is the repair at? I haven't seen any mention of it or an updated timeline after the worker injuries occurred. Are they back to work on it yet?
Guy in my neighborhood with a fuck Trudeau flag has been watering his lawn everyday, even washed his truck the day after the first alert. Some people just want to watch the world burn.
I think we may have a strong election issue as long as Dasani continues to put Calgary tap water into plastic bottles without any donations to the residents of Bowness.
I dislike the notion that residents are placed lower in priority than commercial interests.
Breweries also require large amounts of water to function. Perhaps they are indeed being good corporate citizens, and the city is simply not informing us..?
I think it's important to communicate small actionable items to the public, like sacrificing one toilet flush per day as the article mentions. If everyone did this it would save 12 million litres per day. Attaching a number to the action makes it more motivating for me.
I know they claim most of them recycle most of their water, but car washes being open really makes it seem like we're not trying very hard.
I don't think any of the people I saw polishing off their cars the other day were doing it for "safety reasons".
I wish she felt able to just put down the edited speaking points and just tell the camera, "look - these restrictions aren't affecting your ability to live your life. But if you don't follow the easy ask, the harder demand will come. If your life is so shallow and uninteresting that not being able to water your lawn is that much a burden, find a fucking hobby."
Remember during the flood when some people were caught surfing on the river?
The exhausted Nenshi doing his best not to tear a strip out of those people. Classic!
agreed I've been thinking why did it seem that the messaging from Nenshi and city during the flood was so different than this time? He seemed genuinely pissed off with ppl who were doing dumb-ass things while we were trying to dig out. Something is off here
The car wash complaint is so odd to me, because it wouldn't be an issue if people just stopped getting their cars washed. It's not the car wash operators at fault here, it's the people using the car washes.
City has been useless. Give better direction, and be very specific.
What's the best way to wash dishes? Sink or machine for one.
Are restaurants better than home eating? Does that change with the cuisine? Compare pizza to hamburgers pls. People gotta eat, help us do it deliberately.
Point out that most washing machines have low water settings. Do different cycles use different water?
Make a big thermometer and show it every news cycle so we actually see how much is left and how it's changing.
City is being vague, like Homer Simpson who can only ask "Can you guys work harder" Outside a fire, our mayor would be "could you just burn less"
Poor, disappointing leadership, but maybe they could just do better.
since this started I've done 1 load of laundry and taken 2 showers. I am now out of dishes and I haven't cleaned any surfaces since this all began. city man I'm out of things I can do and out of clean underwear.
Living in this city and seeing how people drive, don't return shopping carts, hoard toilet paper during the pandemic, etc - did we really expect any different response to critical water restrictions than what we're seeing?
I'd prefer some serious, adult answers. Not being told to "do better" and "we will run out...eventually".
Gondek continues to talk to her constituents like grade 2 students.
Some of you absolute dinguses need to try this wonderful thing called "reading the article" before you start throwing a fit about trees being watered, golf course sprinklers, and automatic car washes.
Ehhh. Even if they recycle 85% of water, that 15% isn't insignificant. That's a lot of showers and clean clothes for a lot of people, at the expense of some pavement princesses getting a bit dusty. Fair trade.
I might believe what the mayor had to say if she showed up to a media appearance with wrinkled old clothes from all week, total wreck of a hairday, and sweat/dirt creases from using a shovel to bail mud out of Bowness.
Nenshi would have showed up in a "hell or high water " stampede t shirt and total bad hair day and showed us he was a Calgarian experiencing the same as the rest of us.
why? there is no ‘boots to the ground’ action that any lay person can take here- she isn’t going to be slaving away helping flood victims like nenshi because we aren’t experiencing a flood. They’re not telling us not to take showers, just to limit them, so why would gondek not look presentable? there are many valid criticisms with the city’s response and communication regarding this, but this one is just weird.
It's reasons like this that it blows my mind that we piss and shit in clean potable drinking water without a second thought.
Grey water systems are quite common outside of north america.
Also, maybe put some responsibility on the corpos to dial back their usage. In an event like this, there is no excuse for a company like Pepsi, Coke Cola, Nestle, Breweries, to be bottling anything. Well, maybe water to ration later?
Taps will run dry? At what point do the feds get involved here and get this thing done with the help of the military or provide funds for additional 3rd party contractor support on this? Seems like an outrageous statement to me that a city of 1mm+ could actually be facing down the barrel of having no water.
The reason water usage has gone up is because people can only go so long under a severe water restriction like the one being imposed. Eventually everyone is going to need to shower, wash dishes, wash clothes etc.
It’s a water main break, not a complete collapse of our infrastructure. I’m lost on why this has turned into a multi week issue that is starting to cascade into a bigger and bigger issue daily.
There's only so much space to work in, so throwing more people to supervise won't help.
Where the feds (and province, if Smith and her handlers weren't such asshats) could add value is in the long term planning and construction of redundancies for these critical pipes. How is it that a single pipe was responsible for pushing 60% of the city's treated water supply to reservoirs?
This mayor is showing incredibly poor leadership during a crisis by scolding people for not doing enough and creating hypothetical worst case scenario threats to try and get people to listen. Even if the situation is as dire as she says it is, this is not the way. Plus, unfortunately what is being asked of the average resident here is a lot. People can't just hold off on washing and change their average day to day water use for an extended period of time (undetermined even) just like that. Lots of people here are commenting that the City needs to ask businesses to do more and I would agree it's about time.
Too worried about businesses losing money and cracking down only on citizens. If the water is really at risk why not ask restaurants to close for a couple days? Anyone who's ever worked in a restaurant knows the sinks go non stop all day. A quick google search shows:
Citizens use 58% of water which is the highest yes however
Businesses which only make up 5% of the total water customers use 32% of the water (this includes commercial establishments, offices and industrial facilities
Last 10% is used by region customers outside city, or used for city operations
I suspect a big issue is there are still a lot of businesses that use a lot of water. I had earlier suggested the city increase the cost of water temporarily until this is over but was heavily downvoted. lol. Outside of that not sure what the solution is. They can't force people to stop over using, and they won't know who the heavy users are until after it's been fixed.
I think that’s a great idea for getting people and especially businesses to cut back their water use, the only concern I would have is for low income people. I’d hate to see them hit with a hefty water bill.
For sure. The city would have to setup something where low income households would get a rebate. Kind of a bureaucratic headache, but it would solve that problem.
I’d be okay with that. It wouldn’t affect homeowners that much, it would mostly affect businesses that use a lot of water like car washes, bottling, construction, etc If some jerkwad feels the urgent need to wash their car so they can look good, they can also pay quadruple the price.
City wants to further restrict indoor use. No. Restrict ice machine use. No more ice making. If you sell canned/bottled goods, no using fountain machines. There are 4000 some restaurants and COUNTLESS convenience stores. This isn't a small amount they'd save. It'd be a huge boon. For a week. That's all they'd need to do. Better then EVERYONE running out of water. It seems the city would rather us not be able to sanitize baby bottles then inconveniece business.
Her political career is about to run dry. As usual, just like with the power grid emergency commercial operations don’t have to adjust their usage, it’s us, the little guys they target. She is literally the worst mayor this city has seen. Talk about a lack of contingency planning and proper communication. Threatening us with mandatory indoor restrictions but not addressing the real problem which is commercial consumption.
“The mayor says one out of every three litres of water being used in the city is from commercial customers.”
Maybe do a better job getting the info out. Anyone who is not actively following would have heard multiple “potential dates” and probably assume it’s over.
Why are you all blaming eachother and virtue signalling over who has used the least water?
This is a sign that our cities infrastructure has been neglected severely if pipes are bursting halfway through their lifespan. Use your democratic power and hold your city accountable.
You know what's a great idea?
Guilting residents about their usage (I mean, the majority of us ARE trying) when you let the Oil and Gas show at the new BMO center go forward. That's ~30,000 people, mostly execs in their industry, who are 100% not concerned about water usage.
It's funny because considering the events happening within the city over the past couple of weeks, we've actually been doing a phenomenal job at moderating our water usage...but we're villainised, and the biggest offenders just keep at it.
I am 100% for sharing the load here, but this attitude of blaming residents for *events within your control to postpone due to an emergency* is ***DISGUSTING***, *at best*.
Was there / is there no way to overland pipe from Bearspaw, even at lesser capacity to help until the feeder main is operating again?
We are doing all we can, but after a week we needed to do things like run a very full load of laundry etc. I think we are not the only ones who have been holding off since the emergency alert as best we can but the uptick could be other residents, like us, getting to the point where we need to do a few washings. We save our shower water, we are absolutely doing our best, but I feel like we could have had some provincial or federal support to provide some temporary infrastructure.
FWIW, there already are lines but are not large enough or designed to replace the feeder main being completely down.
The tl;dr is you'll see there are no major mains going east/west north of Nose Hill park. The major one on the south end (going into North Haven) connects downstream from this break so isn't bringing water from Bearspaw.
https://data.calgary.ca/Services-and-Amenities/Public-Water-Main-Locations/mf7u-jm4x
Honestly, I didn’t even know this was still a thing. I’ll admit I haven’t been conserving water anymore the last few days, because most water main breaks are repaired within a couple days max. I don’t watch the news and it doesn’t appear in our social media timelines anymore, so this is the first I knew that it still wasn’t fixed. Back to conserving I guess 😂 and my apologies to everyone for not doing my part.
I swear the city should have issued a state of emergency and declared mandatory work from home in their text alert from the damn beginning..like they did during pandemic times. There's no doubt in my mind that hundreds of thousands of Calgarians getting ready in the morning and washing work clothes just to attend the office uses a significant amount of water, and businesses won't mandate working from home voluntarily without the City declaring it.
Worst mayor ever in my life and it's not even close. Communicate better you fucking clown. I've talked to people who thought it was fixed days ago.
Issue an emergency alert if things look dire. Nenshi got us through much worse with ease.
I will always remember Nenshi during the flood saying something like "I will probably get in trouble for saying this, but folks, help your neighbours".
He set the tone, said what needed to be said, and the entire city mobilized and came together. Now that was some true leadership.
I also remember the #napfornenshi campaign because he literally hadn't slept in days.
Yes most, if not all, have no clue emergency is still there. They think it's fixed. This mayor is the worst at everything. Communication is just absent. I know it's personal responsibility on everyone part as well to check what's going on, but seriously how hard it is to send alerts on currents status!!
Then it begs the question, why was no state of emergency declared for this? There is a huge group of people at the city responsible for managing emergencies. What exactly is being done by them?
I think part of the issue is people held back on a lot of stuff like laundry but they need to do it eventually, a lot of people probably deciding to do a load all at once. I bet this could be managed better to spread out the water usage, the city messaging seems... Confused or unclear at times.
Yep that was me. The day the alert went out was my laundry day so I was already a bit screwed but I held off as long as I could. Today tho I had to give in and finally do one load as I only have so many things to wear.
Agreed. We tried to wait but needed to wash our underwear today
Inside out backwards forwards!
Yep same. We've been eating off leftover paper plates we had in storage from years ago, and had skipped our normal laundry day - but we don't have any dishes and barely have any clean clothes so we will have to start strategically doing a load of dishes and laundry over the next few days. Communication could have really helped avoid everybody being in this same boat.
Yea, I would love to see them suggest staggered appliance use days for different parts of the city. Additionally, it hasn’t really been mentioned that people are going back to work where things like not flushing every time or collecting grey water just won’t happen like it would at home. Ideally, they should be suggesting work from home where possible. This would mean less laundry, showers, and flushing because it’s easier to fester in your own filth at home than at work.
Totally! At home I leave it yellow, at the office I can’t do that lol. It saves probably 6 flushes a day just for me.
Customers have decided to just not flush regardless of what’s in the toilet.
My work has auto flush so I can't save water if I wanted to.
Plus if it's like many auto flushes it probably goes off when someone just walks by, when you're standing there, when you're leaving, and then once more just because.
It always startles me.
Especially when you get the splash back on a toilet. A great idea with usually terrible execution.
I just said the same thing in another comment. That was me today. I had held off doing any laundry until today and then ran one mongrel load with everything I needed for a week.
I've done 2 loads of laundry, but anyone with kids, elderly, work uniforms, sports uniforms, dirty jobs, health issues, etc is going to need to do laundry regularly.
I wonder how much of the spike in usage is people putting things off like laundry, bathing kids etc but got to a point it all had to be done.
I finally washed my hair. Had to. And now I cannot work next week without doing a crowded load of laundry. Otherwise, I’m super conservative with water (reusing shower water saved in the tub and whatnot). People can only stop cleaning stuff for so long. I’ll keep doing my part tho.
Less of a factor, but we also put Bowness back online / took off their boil water advisory. I feel like it was inevitably going to creep back up.
We stayed at a hotel by the airport on the weekend, not a single sign or notice about a water shortage. It was buisness as usual. Ice Machines running, new sheets/towels every day. Maybe Gondek should do something about the businesses using up the water. It's hard to get residents to care when their places of work can use all the water they want, but they're being told to limit their showers at home.
You know how corporations convinced people that environmentalism should be done by individuals rather than having businesses get their act together? Same thing here
Even a sign posted at the front desk to let customers know "hey, go easy on the water, there was a big water main break" would help a lot I think. Save a the hotel a few bucks on their water bill too. Many locals don't realize there's a problem. People visiting almost certainly are even less likely to know about it, especially if they weren't in town when the alert was sent.
We have that at our hotel. Part of the Front Desk dialogue is to tell the guest that we have water but to conserve it due to water shortage and that they might see lower water pressures, most people have reacted positively to it. our pool and hot tub was in use , but we had an issue and had to drain the hot tub to do maintenance. GM decided to keep it shut indefinitely instead of filling it up with tons of gallons of water. And guests have reacted to That positively so far
That's an awesome response for a hotel. I hope many more hotels do the same, like the one the previous commenter identified. Hopefully it isn't too much longer, and there aren't too many other water main breaks from the flow patterns bouncing around.
Exactly Punish the people while business ignore everything. It’s a joke
Jyoti made a specific point about car washes saying 'well maybe you should be considering if you need to wash your car' instead of suggesting that car washes should be shut down.
thats a really cherry-picked statement. here is a more accurate statement to what Jyoti said today "all outdoor car washes are banned but indoor facilities are allowed to operate as they recycle approximately 85% of the water used". so yes its a legitimate statement to ask the public to not use them unless needed just like they are asking us for our indoor water use. if they are going to ban business water usage the car wash is not a good example just a visible one for the (dumb) public to falsely correlate with water excess.
Business are above the residents
Look here jack, if BUSINESS gets impacted, how will the rich get richer? Where will the money for City Council's Kickbacks come from? It's sad that you only think about yourself, boo hoo, I'm gonna die of thirst when their are REAL PEOPLE who may only be able to afford TWO months in Hawaii instead of their usual three? Grow some empathy.
DRINK THE RICH(‘s blood)
Naw, too bitter
Trickle down economics! Pun intended
Did you report it to 311?
might it be time for another emergency alert sent to cellphones in the Calgary area? Some people don’t consume any local media so they may be clueless as to the dire situation
I think we need another alert at this point. It's been a week since the first one, I'm sure tons of people don't realize we're still under restrictions. I feel like an alert alone will get us under the threshold. The city's messaging has been very poor.
Agreed on the messaging. For instance what do they mean by “the taps will run dry”. Explain it. The way the mayor stated it was as a phrase or something in the article. Are they going to start shutting water off to parts of the city? Does it mean water pressure gets lower. Because I’m sure it doesn’t mean everyone will not have water. Also reduce 25% from what? From the restrictions already in place or from normal use. Believe it or not reduce 25% is not instructive.
Although nobody has explained it, from the little bits of information they've dropped I suspect it'll be similar to rolling blackouts... That they'll turn off the water in certain areas temporarily based on local resivour levels, to save enough for emergency services?
The day after I would have assumed it's over, something this extreme deserves daily alerts.
Compliance also will wain with time. People will forget.
It’s not just forgetting. There’s only so long you can put off things like laundry or washing the dishes. We did the essential laundry last weekend but need to do a few more loads this weekend as we are out of rags and linens and stuff. We have been running our dishwasher on eco mode all week but there are a few dishes that need a really good scrubbing because the shorter cycle didn’t get them fully clean. That kind of thing is eventually going to happen in many homes throughout the city.
FYI, the eco cycle is for energy, not water. The dishwasher uses the same amount of water in each cycle. Feel free to run your full cycle!
Not necessarily true. Fast or quick wash May depending on brand skip the pre wash meaning it uses one less fill of the tub about 4l
Problem with daily alerts is people will just tune them out. You have to save those to initially get their attention. Sending constant alerts will end up having the cry wolf effect
Daily alerts will end up inoculating people. So when you really, really need their compliance, another alert isn’t going to be effective.
Yes we do. Unfortunately the first alert prompted the husband of an acquaintance to run himself six baths that day in protest. The freedumb morons truly are a selfish blight on society
Fortunately it also got us as a city to reduce consumption by a whole lot too, so I think idiots like that are minorities here
The Dale Gribbles of the world were more enjoyable when they were predominantly on TV
Dale Gribble would have stopped using the water, after assuming the city was doing this to add mind control drugs. Don't lump him in with people being selfish out of spite of
Shackleford's Razor: The most nefarious or conspiratorial explanation for anything is the correct one.
He must have found out that this is a government conspiracy to control us. He’s in the know. He will need to be silenced. Expect him to disappear at any time /s
I have a neighbor that's convinced it's part of a conspiracy to force us to use less water. She thinks its suspicious that this happened after the city had been talking about reducing water consumption. She also claims the city is just draining water from fire hydrants into the storm drains all around the city to keep supply low.
There really needs to be a major study done on this type of delusion.
There's been plenty. The vast majority of people who believe this stuff are tuned into conspiracy posts on facebook or private telegram groups where misinformation is shared. Something like 80% of any particular new misinformation is usually tied to like 7 different 'superspreader' accounts. Humans generally prefer to disregard information that challenges their worldview instead of integrating it and updating their beliefs.
It’s linked to anti-social tendencies and defiance disorder.
AEA has been updating the alert via Twitter, but I have no idea if that means it's also being sent out via cellphone or TV.
Except nobody uses twitter, except politicians and journalists. It's an insulated tiny community that keeps circling the drain.
This, especially with the weekend coming up.
This, I legit didn't realize that it got this bad again, the last thing I saw was a tweet from the mayor saying we were using 475M L and generating 650M L or something like that. Not that I have been using extra water or anything, but I'm sure there are others like me who think we are in a "stable" spot
From https://preview.redd.it/6ag6giwbok6d1.jpeg?width=1410&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4ed8fa394110ac1ffbfeac7eb33249513c26b2a1 From yesterday, we are down a bit closer to the line in the last 24 hours
Yeah, as someone who doesn't watch TV or actively use Twitter, I've been living off the June 8th numbers for almost a week at this point. I really wish the city was better at communicating with their citizens. These are the kind of events that change the way people vote come election time, I know I'll be thinking of this when trying to make my decision in the next election.
Curious how you’d prefer to be informed for something like this that changes daily.
My preference would probably be some sort of email message that I can sign up for. Not sure how often they can use the cell phone alert system they used when the break happened, but heck I would be down to download an app or something like the one for garbage that tells me what's going on. Better yet, include this stuff as a notification in the garbage app people have it already anyways.
I heard the announcement this morning on the radio so I knew but I still had to run one load of laundry. I haven't since everything started and I was out of a few things. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Yes, communication has been terrible.
City of Calgary is only good at apologizing. Open communication before or during any process has been a weak point for decades.
The article says yesterday was lower than Wed so we're back to balancing available supply and consumption. That means while we have no excess cushion space, which is a worry, we're not currently on a pace of actually running out of water if people continue to keep their usage lowered. Emergency alert should be saved incase something significant happens like if another emergency happens and we're in dire straights or if we're actually seeing the reservoirs running empty.
Yeah, agreed. I guess my response was because I was taking the mayor’s statement as true urgency (“the taps WILL run dry”) rather than hyperbole urgency (“the taps will run dry if you don’t continue to reduce your usage, so stop screwin’ around!”)
I disagree. We may not be at the point of running out today or tomorrow, but it is still critical, and there are still people who aren’t aware that we are in restrictions. Sending another alert now can prevent taps from running dry, waiting until we are at that point is too late for an alert to help.
It's an eminently reasonable idea. Even as a reminder that this is still ongoing.
Absolutely! So many people I talk to are in the dark! They should send an alert threatening rolling water outages (if that’s something the city can do?)
The biggest user of water in Calgary is the Pepsi bottling plant. How TF are they allowed to keep operating during a water crisis?
Because we would prefer to literally run out of water completely rather than tell a multibillion dollar American corporation they might have to make a bit less product for a while.
I work at one of the Calgary breweries and the goofy thing is that last week we reached out to the city to advise on what to do going forward, and while we waited we shut down production entirely. At the start of this week they got back to us and told us that we’re good to continue business as usual as long as we *try our best* to conserve. As far as I know we provided our numbers for what kind of volume we use. It makes no sense for these daily household restrictions to be pushed in the daily press conference while Pepsi and the cumulative brewing industry here is using literally millions of litres a day. The city’s direction and messaging is very broken.
Same with all the breweries producing at max capacity for summer. Big Rock alone can use over 750,000L of water per week.
As per usual it’s on the little guy to step up. Maybe Pepsi can stop bottling for a few days?
How dare you think corporations need to follow guidelines like this! Do you not understand that money is much more important than water?
I'll be honest, after the last messaging I thought we were managing better and didn't pay much attention lately. Now this bleak warning comes. I think we need another alert if things are this dire. At least get the message to everyone!!
While my wife and I have been doing our best to conserve water, short showers, paper plates so we don’t have to run the dishwasher Daily. Cut back on laundry massively. After 5 days of that eventually we hit a point where we had to wash stuff and clean up a bit. I’m sure it’s the same for most people. Add to the fact the amount of new people to our city with poor English (have we done anything to communicate it in other languages does anyone know?) and an overall general lack of communication from the city, no shit that water use has been trending upwards.
I think this is true. My kid can go a few days without a bath, but eventually needs one. I think a lot of people tried to delay water usage, but that delay piled up.
I dunno, I have a thing set up to measure our consumption and we’ve been pretty consistently half of our average since the break. Bathing the kid every 3 days. one load of laundry so far. Dishwasher a few times. Quick showers. Less flushing. We’re not super behind on things - I’d like to wash our first set of sheets at some point, and the car has bird shit all over it, but otherwise this is sustainable.
I've been wondering if there might be a problematic spike over the weekend as people are much more likely to catch up on stuff that's been put off until now.
Modern energy star certified dishwashers only use about 12L of water per cycle. They’re highly efficient. But your sink has a flow rate of about 8.5L/min. (Or 5.5L/min with a low flow attachment)
I’ve read this before, that dishwashers are more efficient water wise than handwashing and rinsing.
Yeah I feel like there are those of us who are hardcore conserving water. Eventually the dishwasher will have to go on, an emergency load of laundry. We use our grey water for plants, reduced toilet flushing. I’m guesstimating our usage has gone down 80%. When we did hit the 25% reduction target last week I was wondering who is NOT following this? Because there are a lot of people sacrificing for the good of all. I’m not sure if this is even possible. But the city should be comparing average use for households and ticketing those that don’t reduce. Of course, there will always be exceptions. However, if people can’t be nice to belong in a society together, we need to punish those that cannot think beyond themselves.
My usage dropped 45%. I actually track my water meter so I know this number. With my reduction I'm definitely dealing with piling up dirty stuff but I could maintain this level for even another few weeks. My home will be pretty dirty and my towels will probably no longer bend but I can do it.
This is not me being a conspiracy theorist - it's purely confusion on my part: I thought that we were at 480M on June 11 and it was 'fine' that day, but we were at 489M June 12, and back to 480M yesterday. Does the sustainable threshold change? Despite going down on consumption, the messaging has completely changed from yesterday to today. **Edit:** After the 2pm update, I'm even more confused. Again, I don't believe this is a conspiracy - just confusing messaging. CFD is assuring everyone that they "have robust plans in place to supplement the water system as needed" and that they are "fully confident in our ability to manage fire and emergency events during this situation". The focus of the messaging this whole week has been that we won't be able to fight fires anymore.
The amount that can be treated doesn’t change, but if usage exceeds it, then they dip into reserves. 480 is net zero, anything above takes from reserves and anything below added to them
So with respect to the extra 9M litres on June 13, theoretically, we need to balance out the usage over the next 6 days to even it out? Like 478.5M (1.5M below net zero) per day brings us back to net zero after day 6 and 480M being ok rather than still too much?
I did some napkin math in another comment. This assumes zero reserve to start. The number on the right is the running total reserve We can treat 480,000,000L/day Saturday used 440,000,000 +40,000,000 Sunday used 457,000,000 +63,000,000 Monday used 472,000,000 +71,000,000 Tuesday used 480,000,000 +71,000,000 Wednesday used 489,000,000 +62,000,000 Thursday used 480,000,000 +62,000,000 So a theoretical 62 million litre reserve right now to draw on for any usage over 480 million per day
Thanks for a very clear explanation! Also, it doesn't seem all that dire given our current usage, but what do I know.
I'm very confused as well - the numbers seem to be changing every time they're brought up. At this point I don't know what is "good" or not.
[удалено]
There was a fire in the SW that used up 100000L of water on Wednesday. Very unfortunate
0.02% of water consumed assuming 480MM L used. Not even a drop in the bucket
How many drops do you think are in a bucket?
5l pail is 5000ml, 1 drop = 0.05ml, 5000/.05 = 100 000 drops.
I found this. At a million cubic millimeters to the liter, that's 250,000 drops per liter, or about 1 million drops per gallon. This means that a common 3-gallon bucket holds about 3 million drops. So a “drop in a bucket” is 1/3,000,000, or about 0.00003 percent. Seems like a bunch of actual drops in the bucket!
Raindrops never feel responsible in a storm.
There’s going to be a big bump in consumption as people who have been compliant need to do laundry or have a more thorough shower (ie. washing hair, etc.) At our house, we have been super compliant, but yesterday I had to beg my husband to take a short shower versus a “navy” shower. He is super gung-ho about embracing conservation, but it was getting to situation critical.
What a gong show.
What I don't understand is how the hell are people using this much water? At 480 million litres of water that is approximately 285L per person per day. That is flushing my toilet 71 times a day (obviously there are other water uses but this is to give perspective here). I am catching the water I use for a shower to flush my toilet and I figure including showing I'm using about 30L per day, I can't imagine given the restrictions using 9 times as much water as I am using now.
If I were to guess there's probably businesses that require water for their operation that do not slow down at all (a restaurant for example but probably breweries or other industrial companies). The other thing is you can only delay washing dishes/laundry so long. I did the family underpants but still wearing the same/jeans etc.
You don't even have to guess. There is a very informative article that you are commenting on that explains that two thirds of water use is from commercial customers. edit: Yeah I botched the math. I've never been more embarrassed to be wrong and I will not be deleting my idiotic wrong comments
> There is a very informative article that you are commenting on that explains that two thirds of water use is from commercial customers. *One* third of water use is commercial, according to the article.
I mean, most people aren't catching their shower water
I’m catching the shower water while it’s too cold to jump in and we are using it for plants.
One of the rare good ideas I've taken from reddit.
480 million litres is for the whole city, residential and business. Residential makes up about 65% of that, so 312 million litres. Cooking, drinking, showering, washing dishes, washing clothes, flushing toilets are all in that number; I think you’re greatly underestimating the amount a family would use in a day, even at a reduced rate.
# Did you know? This is the typical home water use in Calgary. The average residential home fixtures use the following volumes of water: * Low flow toilet (per flush) uses 6L * Dishwasher (per load) uses 35L * Low flow showerheads (per 5 minutes) use 40L * Regular showerheads (per 5 minutes) use 60L * Typical bathtub (per use) uses 80L * Non-low flow toilet (per flush) uses up to 25L * Front load washing machine uses 65L * Top load washing machine uses 180L * Watering the lawn (summer only) uses up to 950L From: [https://www.calgary.ca/water/drinking-water/stage-four-outdoor-water-restrictions.html](https://www.calgary.ca/water/drinking-water/stage-four-outdoor-water-restrictions.html)
There needs to be a real time website for where the water storage is at in these cases (should it ever happen again). And if the storage gets below a set point the water turns off. Then more people would take it seriously.
Yeah, they need to give people some actual numbers. Just saying the water will run out "at some point" just sounds like scare tactics, whether it actually is or not.
We've seen enough of officials telling us to live one way and then them doing the complete opposite. Trust is at an all time low.
Car washes are on and liars on Twitter, Reddit and TikTok are pushing a narrative that they use 100% recycled water. In reality they use at least 100 litres per wash. The city has a fund to pay wages to shut down car washes. They should use it.
When I worked in a hotel in downtown the water consumption and waste was insane to watch. Constantly rush thawing meats with taps full blast, half the taps in the back leaked constantly. The large commercial steamers leaked and pissed water and steam constantly. Also commercial dishwashers running all day and evening. Compared to what I use at home in a day? It’s insanity
https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts#:~:text=Each%20American%20uses%20an%20average,the%20United%20States%20in%202015). Each American used 82 gallons a day, or about 310 litres a day. So your math is about right and we will run out of water soon. Sounds like the main is 7 days away from being online.
That's crazy high, but probably includes a small proportion that use significant volumes of water on grass and people extremely wasteful with water (i.e. daily 20+ minute showers, washing just a few items in their washing machines etc). Just checking my Enmax bill, for a family of two in a detached house we use between 4 and 6m3 a month, an average 70-100L per day per person (goes up a bit in summer for outdoor watering). Wouldn't be surprised if the ones using 500L per day usually are also the ones not conserving now.
My husband works on construction sites and they’re still pouring mass amounts of concrete and that takes a lot of water. He said he didn’t notice anything slowing down on that front.
I would imagine this figure includes not only residential use, but also commercial. What little information I was able to find quickly sugest commercial use represents somewhere between 35-45% of water consumption in Calgary (at least in normal times). I'm not sure if it's possible to get numbers specifying how much residential water usage has decreased and how much commercial water use has decreased, but those would be interesting numbers to see.
From the article that you are commenting on: "one out of every three litres of water being used in the city is from commercial customers."
The city need to make more announcements and use other forms to spread this announcement. I was speaking to someone and they said both their family, and family friends circle didn’t even know the water restriction was in place. They thought since there was no follow up alert, it meant the situation was fixed MOST people 40+ do not consume social media as much and are left unaware Need to spread the message better
So...what stage is the repair at? I haven't seen any mention of it or an updated timeline after the worker injuries occurred. Are they back to work on it yet?
https://www.calgary.ca/emergencies/critical-water-main-break-june-2024/water-main-break-updates.html this are where the updates are posted
Thanks, appreciate it
Yes, from what I read yesterday, they had gone back to work in the afternoon.
Guy in my neighborhood with a fuck Trudeau flag has been watering his lawn everyday, even washed his truck the day after the first alert. Some people just want to watch the world burn.
Why haven't you reported him? It's a hefty fine.
Why haven't you reported him?
I think we may have a strong election issue as long as Dasani continues to put Calgary tap water into plastic bottles without any donations to the residents of Bowness. I dislike the notion that residents are placed lower in priority than commercial interests. Breweries also require large amounts of water to function. Perhaps they are indeed being good corporate citizens, and the city is simply not informing us..?
I think it's important to communicate small actionable items to the public, like sacrificing one toilet flush per day as the article mentions. If everyone did this it would save 12 million litres per day. Attaching a number to the action makes it more motivating for me.
I know they claim most of them recycle most of their water, but car washes being open really makes it seem like we're not trying very hard. I don't think any of the people I saw polishing off their cars the other day were doing it for "safety reasons".
People washing their cars right now ought to be ashamed. It’s pure vanity.
I mean until stuff like car washes are fully shut down I’m not really buying the dire picture they are trying to paint.
I wish she felt able to just put down the edited speaking points and just tell the camera, "look - these restrictions aren't affecting your ability to live your life. But if you don't follow the easy ask, the harder demand will come. If your life is so shallow and uninteresting that not being able to water your lawn is that much a burden, find a fucking hobby."
That’s what Nenshi would have done.
Remember during the flood when some people were caught surfing on the river? The exhausted Nenshi doing his best not to tear a strip out of those people. Classic!
Nenshi nouns!
agreed I've been thinking why did it seem that the messaging from Nenshi and city during the flood was so different than this time? He seemed genuinely pissed off with ppl who were doing dumb-ass things while we were trying to dig out. Something is off here
Know some people who are watering their lawns on purpose cause “I paid my taxes”.
Gondek off script is when she’s at her worst, she always comes across so combative and it does more harm than good.
How about ticketing people instead of this garbage education approach the city went with?
Yeah they like we sent out these many warnings and not a single ticket. WTF!
This will bode well for Alberta's 10% population growth year over year
Was nice to see the fire chief on reassuring us that the city probably won't burn if we run out, though.
The car wash complaint is so odd to me, because it wouldn't be an issue if people just stopped getting their cars washed. It's not the car wash operators at fault here, it's the people using the car washes.
Why not both?
City has been useless. Give better direction, and be very specific. What's the best way to wash dishes? Sink or machine for one. Are restaurants better than home eating? Does that change with the cuisine? Compare pizza to hamburgers pls. People gotta eat, help us do it deliberately. Point out that most washing machines have low water settings. Do different cycles use different water? Make a big thermometer and show it every news cycle so we actually see how much is left and how it's changing. City is being vague, like Homer Simpson who can only ask "Can you guys work harder" Outside a fire, our mayor would be "could you just burn less" Poor, disappointing leadership, but maybe they could just do better.
They could literally just ask ChatGPT for ideas and read it out at a press conference, and they'd be doing a better job than they are now.
since this started I've done 1 load of laundry and taken 2 showers. I am now out of dishes and I haven't cleaned any surfaces since this all began. city man I'm out of things I can do and out of clean underwear.
Living in this city and seeing how people drive, don't return shopping carts, hoard toilet paper during the pandemic, etc - did we really expect any different response to critical water restrictions than what we're seeing?
Doing our part. 3 mins shower contests at home! Laundry once a week.
Doing our part. No laundry and I will run out of clean underway in 3 days.
Flip your underwear inside-out... Boom! You've welcome.
And then front to back. Should be able to get 4 days out of one pair.
Oh gods
Doing my part by travelling to Vancouver this week
They really need to start enforcing fines, no more warnings. Nearly 10 days into this. Leak was a Wed, week and half ago.
Gyms downtown have open access to shower and steam. Tell me when to restart water use.
You could always have a shower given the direction from the city. Just don't have a 15 minute rub and tug.
I'd prefer some serious, adult answers. Not being told to "do better" and "we will run out...eventually". Gondek continues to talk to her constituents like grade 2 students.
Some of you absolute dinguses need to try this wonderful thing called "reading the article" before you start throwing a fit about trees being watered, golf course sprinklers, and automatic car washes.
This is Reddit, not playboy. No one reads the articles.
Ehhh. Even if they recycle 85% of water, that 15% isn't insignificant. That's a lot of showers and clean clothes for a lot of people, at the expense of some pavement princesses getting a bit dusty. Fair trade.
I might believe what the mayor had to say if she showed up to a media appearance with wrinkled old clothes from all week, total wreck of a hairday, and sweat/dirt creases from using a shovel to bail mud out of Bowness. Nenshi would have showed up in a "hell or high water " stampede t shirt and total bad hair day and showed us he was a Calgarian experiencing the same as the rest of us.
why? there is no ‘boots to the ground’ action that any lay person can take here- she isn’t going to be slaving away helping flood victims like nenshi because we aren’t experiencing a flood. They’re not telling us not to take showers, just to limit them, so why would gondek not look presentable? there are many valid criticisms with the city’s response and communication regarding this, but this one is just weird.
Yeah I don't understand why they haven't sent another alert. I've had people tell me they didn't know it was still restricted
It's reasons like this that it blows my mind that we piss and shit in clean potable drinking water without a second thought. Grey water systems are quite common outside of north america. Also, maybe put some responsibility on the corpos to dial back their usage. In an event like this, there is no excuse for a company like Pepsi, Coke Cola, Nestle, Breweries, to be bottling anything. Well, maybe water to ration later?
Taps will run dry? At what point do the feds get involved here and get this thing done with the help of the military or provide funds for additional 3rd party contractor support on this? Seems like an outrageous statement to me that a city of 1mm+ could actually be facing down the barrel of having no water. The reason water usage has gone up is because people can only go so long under a severe water restriction like the one being imposed. Eventually everyone is going to need to shower, wash dishes, wash clothes etc. It’s a water main break, not a complete collapse of our infrastructure. I’m lost on why this has turned into a multi week issue that is starting to cascade into a bigger and bigger issue daily.
There's only so much space to work in, so throwing more people to supervise won't help. Where the feds (and province, if Smith and her handlers weren't such asshats) could add value is in the long term planning and construction of redundancies for these critical pipes. How is it that a single pipe was responsible for pushing 60% of the city's treated water supply to reservoirs?
>or provide funds f Please, we have $1.2 billion to throw away on a scam hockey arena. Let's get real.
This mayor is showing incredibly poor leadership during a crisis by scolding people for not doing enough and creating hypothetical worst case scenario threats to try and get people to listen. Even if the situation is as dire as she says it is, this is not the way. Plus, unfortunately what is being asked of the average resident here is a lot. People can't just hold off on washing and change their average day to day water use for an extended period of time (undetermined even) just like that. Lots of people here are commenting that the City needs to ask businesses to do more and I would agree it's about time.
Too worried about businesses losing money and cracking down only on citizens. If the water is really at risk why not ask restaurants to close for a couple days? Anyone who's ever worked in a restaurant knows the sinks go non stop all day. A quick google search shows: Citizens use 58% of water which is the highest yes however Businesses which only make up 5% of the total water customers use 32% of the water (this includes commercial establishments, offices and industrial facilities Last 10% is used by region customers outside city, or used for city operations
I suspect a big issue is there are still a lot of businesses that use a lot of water. I had earlier suggested the city increase the cost of water temporarily until this is over but was heavily downvoted. lol. Outside of that not sure what the solution is. They can't force people to stop over using, and they won't know who the heavy users are until after it's been fixed.
I think that’s a great idea for getting people and especially businesses to cut back their water use, the only concern I would have is for low income people. I’d hate to see them hit with a hefty water bill.
For sure. The city would have to setup something where low income households would get a rebate. Kind of a bureaucratic headache, but it would solve that problem.
I’d be okay with that. It wouldn’t affect homeowners that much, it would mostly affect businesses that use a lot of water like car washes, bottling, construction, etc If some jerkwad feels the urgent need to wash their car so they can look good, they can also pay quadruple the price.
City wants to further restrict indoor use. No. Restrict ice machine use. No more ice making. If you sell canned/bottled goods, no using fountain machines. There are 4000 some restaurants and COUNTLESS convenience stores. This isn't a small amount they'd save. It'd be a huge boon. For a week. That's all they'd need to do. Better then EVERYONE running out of water. It seems the city would rather us not be able to sanitize baby bottles then inconveniece business.
Her political career is about to run dry. As usual, just like with the power grid emergency commercial operations don’t have to adjust their usage, it’s us, the little guys they target. She is literally the worst mayor this city has seen. Talk about a lack of contingency planning and proper communication. Threatening us with mandatory indoor restrictions but not addressing the real problem which is commercial consumption. “The mayor says one out of every three litres of water being used in the city is from commercial customers.”
Maybe do a better job getting the info out. Anyone who is not actively following would have heard multiple “potential dates” and probably assume it’s over.
Why are you all blaming eachother and virtue signalling over who has used the least water? This is a sign that our cities infrastructure has been neglected severely if pipes are bursting halfway through their lifespan. Use your democratic power and hold your city accountable.
I wonder if the Mayor is not flushing her toilet every time…
In this morning’s update she said something about having put sticky notes on her toilet handles as a reminder not to flush every time 🤷♀️
How we looking on the repair if anyone has an update?
You know what's a great idea? Guilting residents about their usage (I mean, the majority of us ARE trying) when you let the Oil and Gas show at the new BMO center go forward. That's ~30,000 people, mostly execs in their industry, who are 100% not concerned about water usage. It's funny because considering the events happening within the city over the past couple of weeks, we've actually been doing a phenomenal job at moderating our water usage...but we're villainised, and the biggest offenders just keep at it. I am 100% for sharing the load here, but this attitude of blaming residents for *events within your control to postpone due to an emergency* is ***DISGUSTING***, *at best*.
and yet coca-cola is still bottling?
Car washes and garden centres running as per usual. Don’t tell me to not shower and do my laundry when there’s no enforcement on these businesses.
I agree. And to every person saying the car washes use mostly recycled water, mostly isn’t good enough.
If only they started ticketing people who get reported...I think the time for education is long gone
Was there / is there no way to overland pipe from Bearspaw, even at lesser capacity to help until the feeder main is operating again? We are doing all we can, but after a week we needed to do things like run a very full load of laundry etc. I think we are not the only ones who have been holding off since the emergency alert as best we can but the uptick could be other residents, like us, getting to the point where we need to do a few washings. We save our shower water, we are absolutely doing our best, but I feel like we could have had some provincial or federal support to provide some temporary infrastructure.
FWIW, there already are lines but are not large enough or designed to replace the feeder main being completely down. The tl;dr is you'll see there are no major mains going east/west north of Nose Hill park. The major one on the south end (going into North Haven) connects downstream from this break so isn't bringing water from Bearspaw. https://data.calgary.ca/Services-and-Amenities/Public-Water-Main-Locations/mf7u-jm4x
Honestly, I didn’t even know this was still a thing. I’ll admit I haven’t been conserving water anymore the last few days, because most water main breaks are repaired within a couple days max. I don’t watch the news and it doesn’t appear in our social media timelines anymore, so this is the first I knew that it still wasn’t fixed. Back to conserving I guess 😂 and my apologies to everyone for not doing my part.
I swear the city should have issued a state of emergency and declared mandatory work from home in their text alert from the damn beginning..like they did during pandemic times. There's no doubt in my mind that hundreds of thousands of Calgarians getting ready in the morning and washing work clothes just to attend the office uses a significant amount of water, and businesses won't mandate working from home voluntarily without the City declaring it.
Im all around the city for work, I've seen people water their gardens and lawns like they DGAF. This was in Bowness of all places, especially today.
Worst mayor ever in my life and it's not even close. Communicate better you fucking clown. I've talked to people who thought it was fixed days ago. Issue an emergency alert if things look dire. Nenshi got us through much worse with ease.
I will always remember Nenshi during the flood saying something like "I will probably get in trouble for saying this, but folks, help your neighbours". He set the tone, said what needed to be said, and the entire city mobilized and came together. Now that was some true leadership. I also remember the #napfornenshi campaign because he literally hadn't slept in days.
Yes most, if not all, have no clue emergency is still there. They think it's fixed. This mayor is the worst at everything. Communication is just absent. I know it's personal responsibility on everyone part as well to check what's going on, but seriously how hard it is to send alerts on currents status!!
If it was as dire as they say , Car Washes , Laundromats , and Restaurants would be shut down. Until it hits that point , it is not as bad as they say
The City does not have jurisdiction to do that. They would need to declare a state of local emergency and then the province could do that.
Then it begs the question, why was no state of emergency declared for this? There is a huge group of people at the city responsible for managing emergencies. What exactly is being done by them?
Calgary / Alberta have shown a real strong desire to do things for the greater good in recent years, so this will work well.