Water rationing could be coming to your city next
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
163.08788
Summary
Calgary, Canada is experiencing a major water main break that has affected the city's water supply for days. The problem is that the city has no idea if they have enough water to supply all of the city s residents and businesses.
Transcript
00:00:06.300
Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision?
00:00:10.620
And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection,
00:00:14.060
and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web?
00:00:21.360
Choose security solutions from Telus for peace of mind at home and online.
00:00:25.220
Visit telus.com slash total security to learn more.
00:00:30.000
Whether you own a bustling hair salon or a hot new bakery,
00:00:34.920
you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs.
00:00:38.780
With flexible coverage options from TD Insurance, you only pay for what you need.
00:00:51.980
One of Canada's biggest cities just doesn't have water right now.
00:00:56.680
Or that's what it seems like I'm hearing and seeing on the news.
00:01:03.860
Calgary is undergoing a major shock to their system after a complete failure of a water main.
00:01:11.240
It's fascinating because it's getting close to tourism season in Calgary.
00:01:19.180
And I can tell you that there's conversations out here in eastern Canada, central Canada,
00:01:27.340
Don Braid has been covering everything that has been going on with Calgary and its water supply,
00:01:33.020
including getting answers to questions that city officials will not provide.
00:01:37.420
He's been writing about this in the Calgary Herald and joins me now.
00:01:40.900
Don, I know perhaps I've gone over the top in saying Calgary doesn't have water.
00:01:46.300
I get that you do, but give me a sense of the situation.
00:01:50.620
This is almost a month now of you being asked to reduce water supply, major water main breaks.
00:02:00.180
Well, from day to day in the city, they're almost normal, really.
00:02:06.300
The reality is the rest of the city, apart from the neighborhoods directly affected by this break,
00:02:11.520
have to keep their water use below a certain level.
00:02:14.580
And in that way, the second reservoir in the city can supply the whole city.
00:02:19.200
So here in our place, we have no problem at all.
00:02:26.180
They're going to truck in non-potable water to deal with the sort of horsey things,
00:02:32.160
like watering down the yards and all that sort of stuff.
00:02:39.420
I don't think anybody should not come for a stampede because of this.
00:02:45.500
I mean, we have a major water line break, which is something so new for almost everybody in this country.
00:02:52.300
You can drive a truck through this line, Brian.
00:03:00.420
I mean, we didn't know anything about this stuff.
00:03:06.320
So when you break a line like that, you've got a major explosion, which, as it happens,
00:03:12.200
is right on the Trans-Canada Highway, 16th Avenue through the northwest of the city,
00:03:18.820
Now, you can go around that on bypasses, but it's shut down.
00:03:23.700
The initial neighborhoods that were directly affected, particularly Bonaise, do have water of a sort now.
00:03:30.880
The rest of the city has water as long as we keep our consumption down.
00:03:34.900
So let me ask, if you've got a home or a business right near this break, say, in the Bonaise neighborhood,
00:03:44.280
At the beginning, on the 5th of the month, when the thing popped, no, there was nothing.
00:03:52.820
Two neighborhoods, Montgomery and Bonaise, on the west side of the city, were completely without water.
00:03:58.800
That was about the extent, and that was resolved in many ways after a few days, more or less.
00:04:08.360
But that was about the extent of the direct impact on people.
00:04:11.680
Now, you tell people that we might run out of water, they do tend to respond.
00:04:17.620
And the compliance has been pretty good so far.
00:04:26.440
These city workers and their gigantic excavations going on, they found six separate faults.
00:04:32.680
There's a place where the line popped, exploded, literally.
00:04:36.500
And then there's five other places where they have to replace pipe.
00:04:40.900
And they have to bring in gigantic sections of steel pipe.
00:04:44.200
The pipeline has been coming, pipe has been coming from San Diego.
00:04:48.200
The people of San Diego had happened to have some of the right diameter and the right type to send.
00:04:55.120
And they arrive with little messages written on them.
00:05:02.400
It reminded me of, you know, World War II, guys writing messages on the bombs before they dropped.
00:05:12.500
So you describe this pipe that you can literally drive a truck through.
00:05:26.800
When I lived in Ottawa, when I covered Parliament Hill, I remember them having to replace water pipes below the city streets.
00:05:34.940
That it turns out had been, well, they were made of wood.
00:05:39.620
MacDonald had literally been there for their installation.
00:05:45.720
And you're talking about a concrete pipe from the 1970s failing.
00:05:52.220
Well, just to set the stage for that, the other reservoir here has pipe that's been working for 92 years without anything but minor failures, occasional gaskets and stuff like that.
00:06:05.900
That pipe, according to one guy who's very familiar with this system that worked on all this stuff for years, he said you could take a diamond cutter to that pipe and you'd have trouble getting through it.
00:06:20.240
The problem with this pipe that started coming out in the mid, so literally, 92 years without a big leak of any kind.
00:06:31.440
This pipe that was made from the 1950s to the 1990s was made with more porous concrete.
00:06:42.840
It really does, you know, but everybody thought it was just fine, but it turns out that it's very susceptible to chemical corrosion.
00:06:52.700
You know, one of the guys that I spoke to put it this way.
00:06:55.440
He said the stuff that's really bad for these pipes is topsoil, the stuff that's great in your garden.
00:07:04.680
We call it toxic waste, certain chloride sulfides and chemicals like that.
00:07:09.200
I saw your headline and your column on that, and I thought, how on earth is topsoil in my garden going to ruin a water pipe?
00:07:19.760
This is a very, very good question, but it does, because the sulfides and chlorides and salt and things like that, as one other guy said, almost anything in the periodic table is bad for a pipeline.
00:07:31.880
With the ideal location for these pipelines, the ones that have this more porous kind of concrete, what they really need is sand and gravel around them.
00:07:42.800
And that's the crazy thing about this huge break, because these pipes like to be in sand and gravel, which does not corrode.
00:07:49.280
And so that's why they never expect a break like this anywhere near a riverbed, because that's the kind of soil you get near a riverbed.
00:08:00.300
So at this point, I'm guessing, I think I've learned a lot, but I'm guessing.
00:08:04.280
I'm guessing that loads of other kind of stuff were poured over it.
00:08:12.980
And then gradually, over time, some of these chemicals seeped down to the pipe, and not just in one place, Brian, but in six different places.
00:08:23.680
Now, the other five places haven't leaked, but they still have to replace the pipe because of this.
00:08:33.480
Well, it's supposed to be right now, perhaps for publicity reasons as much as anything,
00:08:39.000
they're saying that the worst will be over, and the lines could be functioning by July the 5th,
00:08:44.380
which is the opening day of Stampede, as it happens.
00:08:48.460
They're saying it's not entirely a sure thing, but they could well be back in full service.
00:08:57.460
Once they've got the stuff connected, filled in, they have to flush things out.
00:09:04.760
In fact, some city workers have been harassed because when people have seen them flushing out lines,
00:09:10.380
which is something they have to do to do this work, but they've been harassed for wasting water.
00:09:16.100
But they have to, once they get this stuff buried, or at least once they get it installed,
00:09:21.840
they have to do a lot of work checking the safety of the water, a lot of testing, so that could take days.
00:09:27.820
But they think that they might have it back in full service by July 5th.
00:09:31.760
Has the city ordered a review of the rest of their system,
00:09:38.260
given that it sounds like this kind of pipe was used over several decades?
00:09:43.720
Is there a worry that, okay, well, we'll get this fixed,
00:09:48.340
but either along this water main or elsewhere, more things are going to pop, as you say?
00:09:57.040
Sure, and it's not just Calgary that should be concerned about this.
00:10:00.400
Pretty well every major city in Canada has got some pipe of this type.
00:10:08.840
It was supposed to have a lifespan of 100 years, and this is 50, right?
00:10:13.220
One guy says if you have it in absolutely the right condition, sand and gravel and so forth,
00:10:20.720
So this is not, you know, we're getting to the stage, apparently,
00:10:24.980
where this corrosion is happening, and I don't think it's just happening here in Calgary.
00:10:31.400
A hundred or 200 years, and immediately I thought of the aqueducts.
00:10:42.280
My brother-in-law in Edmonton was telling me that there's some construction work going on near him
00:10:48.920
where they're putting in a distribution line in a much smaller neighborhood line,
00:10:52.500
and they actually found a wooden pipe that still had water in it and was still flowing somewhere.
00:10:59.200
It's amazing what worked in the past, and now this is falling apart.
00:11:04.860
Or there's been an attempt to try and say, well, it's the current mayor's fault.
00:11:15.960
I've seen some finger-pointing, and granted, I'm following this from afar.
00:11:22.180
But to me, this is not a partisan issue or a partisan fault.
00:11:31.460
It's probably more of a structural one in terms of the bureaucrats and the people in charge
00:11:42.180
But is there a lot of political finger-pointing trying to blame different politicians,
00:11:50.160
And that's one reason for that, is because two days, three days from now,
00:11:56.040
the new Democratic Party will vote on the new leader.
00:11:58.940
The person expected to win is Nahid Nenshi, who, of course, was the mayor from 2010 to 21.
00:12:09.180
Yeah, a lot of people are saying, yeah, it's his fault.
00:12:12.100
Other people are saying it's Rachel Notley's fault, although she was the premier, not the mayor.
00:12:17.000
And, of course, there's a lot of blame going the other way.
00:12:22.580
And for the moment, as usually happens in a crisis in this country,
00:12:25.880
the parties say, hey, you know, Gondek started this by trying to blame the province for our mayor,
00:12:31.980
Jody Gondek, tried to blame the province for not providing adequate funding,
00:12:37.540
to which Premier Daniel Smith immediately said, well, you never asked for any damn money to replace
00:12:47.280
And then very quickly, the mayor realized that this is not the moment for that sort of thing.
00:12:53.400
And they've been cooperating and collaborating very well.
00:12:55.820
And by pure chance, the province passed a bill in this session giving them the power to completely take over any emergency response
00:13:06.520
from any municipality in the province should they decide the municipality is really screwing it up.
00:13:17.840
So that if things don't go well, if by July 5th it's still going sideways, they can step in and take over.
00:13:27.140
So hypothetically, they could take over, but it's more of a, you know, a bit of a paper threat,
00:13:34.660
but it's still something the city has to consider for sure.
00:13:38.340
Actually, the city of Calvary has pretty good emergency response.
00:13:41.720
We've been through one of the biggest floods in Canadian history here, so they've had a lot of practice.
00:13:50.280
And still the images, and I got there a week or two after, and the images of what it was like are burned into my brain.
00:14:04.460
The city should have known, and you write about this in one of your columns,
00:14:10.440
that they should have known about trouble because of something that happened in January of 2004.
00:14:17.380
There was a smaller line in an area called McKnight Boulevard that went,
00:14:24.700
and that caused, you know, all kinds of local consternation.
00:14:28.580
But why do you say that should have told the city, hey, you've got to look into this?
00:14:34.600
Well, it was in an area where nothing like this was expected because they thought it was in the right kind of soil.
00:14:41.520
So when this popped on McKnight Boulevard on a day when it was almost minus 40,
00:14:48.400
and there was, you know, rivers with boats in them and it quickly turned to ice,
00:14:54.700
when they dug down, what they discovered was corrosion of the same kind.
00:15:00.920
And the corrosion was clearly coming from the soil.
00:15:03.480
They didn't expect anything like this here just as they didn't expect it in the one we're experiencing now.
00:15:08.300
And one of the engineers who was on the spot that day told me that what they discovered
00:15:15.600
was a line of clay running diagonally and touching the pipe at a certain point.
00:15:22.560
And the clay was moist, as clay tends to be, and that kind of tends to absorb bad chemicals.
00:15:28.440
And that's why the line popped, because of that one thing.
00:15:32.260
And, you know, as I said, these things were installed long ago,
00:15:36.740
and I don't think anybody's out there guarding them to make sure nobody puts the wrong soil
00:15:42.020
or a load of road salt or something on top of it.
00:15:47.500
But they had to have known that there was clay in that area then.
00:15:53.240
I mean, you're digging through, you would see there was clay.
00:16:00.320
No, but at that point, it wasn't really understood how susceptible these lines were to corrosion.
00:16:09.900
That's my understanding from talking to the people who were quite garrulous about it,
00:16:14.500
because they're no longer under city secrecy rules,
00:16:18.060
that they didn't really understand how susceptible they were.
00:16:26.560
You say these pipes were used from, what did you say, 1955 to 1990-something?
00:16:33.780
What are they building as you put up new neighborhoods?
00:16:37.440
Well, that's a really good question, and people are asking it at this moment
00:16:42.180
for the reason that they've just passed blanket zoning in Calgary,
00:16:58.660
And people are saying, well, how, you know, like,
00:17:01.040
how can you go ahead with your blanket zoning plan
00:17:03.760
when we now have doubts about the water supply?
00:17:07.820
This is getting really, you know, Calgary-centric and technical,
00:17:11.920
but they should have built another north line into the north side of the city long ago.
00:17:18.400
And they've tried it a couple of times, but they never quite got it going.
00:17:22.880
But how do you serve all these new things that federal money is enabling with their,
00:17:29.180
I forget the name of this housing incentive program, how do you serve them?
00:17:35.900
The question is, maybe you really can't with what we've got now.
00:17:39.140
But are we still using, and the answer would be similar in Toronto or Vancouver or elsewhere,
00:17:50.480
Are we still using pipe that is susceptible to this type of corrosion and breaking
00:17:55.120
when it comes into contact with topsoil or clay?
00:18:00.020
It's, you know, since 1990s, like this was tightened up in the 1990s.
00:18:09.300
because there's an article in a UK magazine, which is really very good,
00:18:22.420
But this article pointed out that in around about 1970,
00:18:27.640
pipeline makers decided that steel technology had progressed so far
00:18:33.480
that they could use less steel reinforcing wire.
00:18:36.740
Now, the way these things work is there's a concrete sleeve that surrounds us all.
00:18:40.680
That's the porous concrete we're talking about.
00:18:42.500
Inside of that, there's all this reinforcing wire that's also essential.
00:18:49.680
The city officials here are saying these wires just started popping.
00:18:53.540
Well, they started popping because the concrete melted, right?
00:19:01.600
That they started in the 1970s of less wire led to all kinds of trouble.
00:19:08.240
In California, Washington, D.C., they all had major blowouts.
00:19:12.280
And from my understanding, though, is that's not the problem here,
00:19:17.720
the pipe that we bought back then to install this line was made in Canada,
00:19:21.860
but still in St. Eustache, Quebec, as a matter of fact.
00:19:28.280
So the problem isn't the wire, even though the city keeps trying to say it is.
00:19:37.400
And that concrete standards were changed and improved and tightened up after 1990.
00:19:42.160
So any newer lines have probably got a better chance.
00:19:47.500
But when we come back, Don, you've covered politics, especially municipal level, for a long time.
00:19:53.420
I want to pull the conversation back from Calgary and talk about it on the wider scale of
00:19:59.140
municipalities just don't like fixing the stuff beneath our feet.
00:20:06.020
When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from Winners, I started wondering,
00:20:14.880
Like that woman over there with the designer jeans.
00:20:36.760
Municipal governments, no matter where you live, love to talk about how they don't have
00:20:42.700
For years, we've heard about the infrastructure deficit.
00:20:46.120
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities is constantly telling provincial and federal governments
00:20:54.080
Don, I want to start there because we've heard those cries by municipal leaders for years.
00:21:00.680
But in my experience covering politics at all levels, municipal leaders don't like fixing
00:21:09.500
Fixing a water main is not nearly as sexy as putting up something new and shiny that you
00:21:14.220
can get your photo taken next to and into the local community newspaper.
00:21:21.920
They knew after 2004, we already talked about that, that they had to do a lot of inspecting.
00:21:29.640
In fact, they immediately established a whole unit at City Hall to do nothing but inspect
00:21:34.820
these pipelines because they knew there was trouble ahead, right?
00:21:38.960
They must have had some indications from things that had happened elsewhere that there was
00:21:46.300
In fact, in 2007, the very line that we're missing now because it popped, they shut it
00:21:56.960
And they could do that in those days because there were many few people on Calgary and you
00:22:00.940
could still supply the city almost even without telling them that this is what you're doing.
00:22:07.240
So they have not, not only have they not properly inspected it, but some of the inspection they
00:22:14.020
did, called acoustic testing, missed five problems with this line.
00:22:21.880
They wait until the crisis comes and then there's an uproar and then they call for funding.
00:22:27.300
They say they're continuing to call for funding, but they haven't called for it for this purpose,
00:22:31.020
right, here in the city, probably nowhere else either.
00:22:39.880
Of course, provinces tend to be a little, uh, crisis, uh, oriented when it comes to funding
00:22:46.880
So you've been talking to the engineers, you've been talking to their, well, retired engineers,
00:22:51.980
the, the guys who, um, are, are blowing the whistle.
00:22:55.900
What are they telling you in terms of what the city's doing, right?
00:22:59.120
What they've missed, what they should have done.
00:23:07.420
They should have found a way to test this line.
00:23:10.800
Uh, they, um, they, they're not saying that they haven't done a lot of things that were.
00:23:17.940
In fact, they do say that this city, because of what happened in 2004, has more aggressive
00:23:23.420
testing than most other Canadian cities of these lines.
00:23:26.380
And of course, there are, in neighborhoods, there are hundreds of little pops every year.
00:23:32.440
Um, and, uh, so there's lots of inspection done.
00:23:35.560
But the question becomes, in this case, why, after having been aware of what the problem
00:23:44.440
So, it, it's a major, a major failure in, in the system somewhere, for sure.
00:23:50.500
And, and really, you know, you asked me earlier, Brian, what, uh, uh, study being done.
00:23:55.840
Well, I initially called, said there should be a full independent study.
00:24:01.680
Because now they say there will be a full independent study, and they can't talk about
00:24:06.820
Well, what do you, you know, what they're like.
00:24:08.960
Probably in this, you know, so I deeply regret having called for a full and independent study,
00:24:14.020
because it'll be months and months, maybe years before we actually hear anything.
00:24:18.580
And I remember, uh, covering Paul Martin cover, uh, announcing the 2004 federal election.
00:24:25.380
And all three of the big issues were either before, uh, an inquiry or the courts.
00:24:36.720
So there, there was a, uh, a committee meeting the other day that where some
00:24:43.620
councillors were, were being aggressive and kind of rubbed the mayor and, and other city
00:24:55.440
Uh, this councillors are, uh, there's another interesting thing happening here because the
00:25:03.160
And by next year's election in the fall of 25 of all munis in, in Alberta, uh, uh, political
00:25:11.540
Now there's a cadre of seven councillors who were conservative, very much opposed, uh, will
00:25:18.620
be definitely UFC, uh, affiliated, if not UCP rather, United Conservative Party affiliated,
00:25:25.620
if not actually named, uh, going into this election.
00:25:28.900
So these people tend to, tend to really ask a lot of hard questions and get very few answers
00:25:35.420
because it really is a pitched battle between the conservatives, the, the UCP leaners and
00:25:41.400
the progressives, uh, the NDP or liberal leaners on council.
00:25:47.060
It's, um, interesting that you're going that way by British Columbia.
00:25:52.060
We don't have it in Ontario, but we should, because we all know, you know, I, I know that
00:25:57.160
Olivia Chow, mayor of Toronto was a new Democrat, you know, that Jody Gondek is a new Democrat,
00:26:03.300
you know, he doesn't take a lot to figure it out.
00:26:07.520
Well, I was going to say that, uh, one thing I've always felt is that when you vote for
00:26:11.400
a council, you really don't know what you're getting.
00:26:13.400
If they have part, if they're part of a party platform, at least you know what platform
00:26:18.820
That, that alone suggests that there's not the, not the worst idea to have political
00:26:24.500
You wrote early on in this crisis that, um, you, you wrote favorably of the mayor and
00:26:31.940
said, one thing you can say for sure is she doesn't run and hide that she was out front
00:26:37.480
Is that still the case or with your comments about, um, people not getting answers, uh,
00:26:45.100
is she backing away from, from being as upfront as, as you appreciated early on?
00:26:50.820
Well, I don't think they're being nearly as upfront as they should be, but I think the
00:26:53.940
mayor, as in any, any crisis can be an opportunity.
00:26:57.320
The mayor has taken a tremendous pounding over, over a number of issues and are declaring
00:27:01.940
a climate crisis, uh, the, the, the bylaw, the crazy bylaw against paper bags that they
00:27:11.900
And then all of a sudden there's this opportunity to be on TV, uh, on YouTube and everything
00:27:17.600
every single day, talking directly to the voters.
00:27:24.080
And so there is a chance that she can redeem herself.
00:27:28.060
Um, and, and a lot of people looking at her might say, well, what's all the fuss about?
00:27:33.860
Uh, you know, Ninchy was, she was up for a recall, wasn't she?
00:27:38.420
And it, it, uh, actually got quite a lot of votes.
00:27:40.980
There was no way it was ever going to succeed, but it was a formal recall under provincial
00:27:44.800
legislation, a formal recall petition under provincial legislation.
00:27:49.040
And then when the city people looked at the ballots, they decided that all of them were
00:27:56.380
They, it's the technicality because you're supposed to have some document that comes with
00:28:02.600
They ruled that every single vote against you on deck was invalid.
00:28:07.460
Did, but they didn't have enough votes to recall.
00:28:12.380
So she's gone from, uh, the point of, uh, you know, a large number of people wanting
00:28:18.980
or gone to, as you say, using this as, as an opportunity.
00:28:22.660
Um, do you, you know, do you think folks that aren't plugged into city hall politics, uh,
00:28:29.300
all the time, we might call them low information voters or that, are they going to turn in,
00:28:33.500
as you say, um, feel like, okay, she's doing a good job.
00:28:37.260
It's kind of what happened to Doug Ford during the pandemic here in Ontario.
00:28:40.720
I think there's a chance of that, but the longer this goes on, uh, the, the less chance there
00:28:48.740
I mean, eventually people, it's like COVID, right?
00:28:51.260
Remember the beginning of COVID when most people were saying, oh yeah, maybe I better
00:28:55.340
And then as the thing wore on, uh, whole, whole careers were ruined.
00:29:01.700
Uh, you know, so this is a very minor way of a little bit like that.
00:29:06.160
If it goes on and on and check, and they're terrified of, tell you this too, Brian, they're
00:29:09.980
terrified of imposing too many restrictions because of the reaction that's still very
00:29:17.940
It's really easy to, to provoke the anti, uh, you know, freedom crowd, freedom crowd again
00:29:27.960
And at, at beginning, at the beginning of this thing, there was a group that were sort
00:29:31.600
of a group of gardeners who were refusing to saying, there's no way we're going to let
00:29:35.840
the city take away our freedom to water our plants.
00:29:39.980
Um, uh, you know, so, so they, they've done it.
00:29:43.420
They've declared this local state of emergency and, uh, and, but they're going really easy
00:29:51.800
Uh, it, it's funny, the reaction that has come out of COVID because I, people I know who
00:29:57.680
were very compliant, at least at the beginning, uh, now bristle at any thought of, of restrictions.
00:30:05.260
It, it, it's, um, it's, it's like a, a, a nervous, uh, twitch, uh, and, and instant, you
00:30:15.020
Uh, you've, um, you've had some odd, uh, you know, requests from city hall though, uh, in
00:30:25.540
terms of, uh, even things like flushing, um, which I saw a lot of mockery about that,
00:30:31.660
but, um, uh, have they at least found a humorous way to, to deal with this?
00:30:37.320
Not particularly, but some of it does make you laugh.
00:30:40.180
Like, uh, getting instructions from the mayor on how to shower, you know, if you get in
00:30:44.460
the shower, get yourself wet, turn the shower off, soap yourself up, uh, turn the water back
00:30:50.340
on, wash the soap off, exit shower kind of thing.
00:30:54.400
And we learned that, uh, if what people, uh, families flush one fewer time per day, we'll
00:31:01.840
save 12 million liters of water every single day.
00:31:06.080
Um, and so there's all kinds of advice coming out that, uh, can sound comical, at least at
00:31:14.840
Uh, I saw the color coded flushing guide being shared online.
00:31:20.120
I hope that you guys do get through this, uh, sooner rather than later, but this is a cautionary
00:31:25.780
tale for municipalities across the country, probably across the continent to, to start
00:31:30.600
looking at the infrastructure and not neglecting it.
00:31:34.700
All right, Don, thank you very much for the time today.
00:31:48.540
Remember you can subscribe to full comment anywhere you get your podcast, Apple, Spotify,
00:31:53.360
Amazon, wherever you get that, uh, help us out by leaving us a rating, giving us a review.