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Calgarians can agree on one thing — we want this infernal water crisis fixed so it never happens again.
The solution has been known and discussed at city hall since at least 1995. Calgary needs a new water main from the Bearspaw water treatment plant to north Calgary.
A new north line was on the verge of approval a decade ago, but faded away when the great city recession hit in 2014-15.
If they’d built the thing then, there would be no problem today for the vast majority of Calgarians. The South Bearspaw feeder could go off-line without threatening drinking water for the whole city.
Now, surprise, there is a detailed plan for a new water line to the north. This pipeline has been approved by city council.
They might even get it done — by 2029.
Preliminary design started early this year. “Geotechnical drilling” began in May. They’ll start digging trenches next year.
This project is hardly ever discussed publicly. Reporters who cover every city utterance on the current mess have rarely if ever heard it mentioned.
Maybe the mayor and her crew are just embarrassed. Obviously, this should have been done years ago. Even if the project proceeds as planned, the city will be vulnerable to failures for nearly five more years.
“We wouldn’t be having this conversation if they’d started building even a few years ago,” says Roy Brander, a retired city water engineer.
“There was a study of the need for this, and there was all kinds of planning done in the early 2010s.”
When hard times hit in 2015, cuts and reorganization came to city hall. It was assumed the city would stop growing — a strange conclusion, given Calgary’s long history of bouncing back after every challenge.
The project was dropped.
Now there’s a note of dawning panic.
“If the line goes down again in the middle of winter, we’d be hooped,” Ward 10 Coun. Andre Chabot says. “We’d have to be on a boil-water advisory citywide for the entire winter if we run short of water.”
Mayor Jyoti Gondek says it’s possible no water will come out of the taps. If that happens, there won’t be anything to boil.
But now there’s a grand plan for a solution — sometime within this decade.
The North Calgary Water Servicing Project has its own city website.
A map shows a much larger project than the original that was supposed to go around, or under, Nose Hill.
This one branches off to the west and heads north along 12 Mile Coulee Road. The pipe would extend all the way to 144th Avenue and 14th Street N.W.
Posted before the current fiasco, the description says: “This is an important next step in the long-term rehabilitation of the Bearspaw South Feeder Main as it allows us to take the existing feeder main out of service while limiting the impacts to Calgarians and our customers.
“This project is essential to meet water demand in northwest Calgary given recent population growth, and provides adequate water supply for future residential and commercial development to take place.”
The line would be 22 kilometres long and hugely expensive. The current Bearspaw South feeder repairs, an ominous harbinger, will likely cost more than $50 million.
A new “large-scale facility” will be built at the Bearspaw plant to “move an additional 100 million litres of water per day into northwest Calgary.”
But no overall funding has been approved by council. Water projects are supposed to be “self-funded,” meaning by you, the ratepayer.
Often the only visible sign will be a bump in water rates. Water pipes are unloved, underground and under the radar.
Not this one. It will become highly political. Ward 1 Coun. Sonya Sharp, whose area is hit by both repairs and restrictions, is already digging back into the city hall records.
She wonders why a vital water pipeline hasn’t moved along faster.
The answer may not be mysterious. Calgary city hall, like most Canadian governments these days, is awful at getting important things done.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald.
X: @DonBraid
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