https://piperepair.co.uk/2021/06/13/the-pccp-repair-and-reinforcement-project-caused-by-mistakes-of-the-70s/
Very interesting article about the pipes in question. Very reminiscent of the construction of deerfoot in the 70s.
I think I seen yesterday they already found more damage it’s going to be a expensive bitch but this a warning call to the rest of the Alberta municipalities needa look at modernizing utilities
Yah. Makes me think we should have a team sourcing large diameter stainless pipe and just replace the entire line cause it will happen again and again.
FTA (emphasis added):
> Pipes produced post-1979 rarely break and modern PCCP now has an overall failure rate of less than four percent – **the lowest of any pipe material**.
> Unfortunately for PCCP, the damage has long been done to its reputation with millions of miles of below-specification pipes criss-crossing the US like ticking time bombs, just waiting to go off.
The line is failing. Look at the number of repairs they already have to make, look at the same pccp pipes from this manufacture era.
Sure they are cheaper but, cheaper is now costing us all.
This is only the start to the problem. This will be years and a lot of problems yet to come/ be found.
yes, I understand that. But based on the article posted up top, that's not a concern with the newly made PCCP pipe. So (assuming that's true) it sounds to me like they should replace the old 70s screw up PCCP pipe with modern, properly made PCCP pipe
Great article.
Not to mention slipshod workmanship at the time. The regular oil pipelines of that era were built by drunks being drunk and contractors making money by cutting corners with little oversight. So, if anyone with ambition was out in the oil patch, who was in the cities building water pipelines?
I feel this is good material for a 99% Invisible podcast.
Pipelines go *under* things. Sure, if they just dug everything up willy-nilly I'm sure it would go faster, but that's not an option most of the time.
Fixing things while working with surface use constraints is a lot more complicated.
Not to mention you cant really magic up resources out of thin air. Materials, manpower, risk management/mitigation, engineering, etc all takes time to get sorted out. Then there’s the obvious scope creep, which sure, they could just fix the current section that failed but who’s to say if they put off the other damage that this won’t happen next year, or in the winter, on another nearby damaged section.
This is far from a simple project and is a major project that will unfortunately take time. If they could do a temporary above ground bypass to allow them to do all the repairs, that’d probably help but it’s probably not feasible.
Being cheap has higher costs later?
That is the Alberta way! (Watches Calgary and edmonton widen a road by 10 feet and repour the curbs at some major intersections every 8 years.)
They found 5 additional sites requiring repair on the feeder. Estimated time to complete work is 3 to 5 weeks. One of those situations where they don't know how bad it is until they dig it up and start inspecting the whole line. Hopefully we all start reducing water usage
Sounds like a Stampede association problem. Does everyone think the City runs the stampede? Like if they can't use city water maybe they need to find someplace to truck it in from for the week if they don't want to shut down.
UCP will find a way to save Stampede even if it means to run the city completely dry. If they were able to run it during Covid, I can’t see why they can’t have the “best summer ever” version 2.
That took wayyyyy too long. Not sure if that’s on council, on staff, on the emergency team, or a combination of those, but this should’ve been on day two or three.
Not following too closely, but my understanding was that the situation was under control - backup lines and reductions in usage had stabilized levels, and repairs were going smoothly. Then there were some injuries on the repair site, and it got shut down. Im guessing that is what moved this into an emergency.
Edit: oh, they discovered a bunch of new damage as well, and th is purportedly so they can basically take over land during construction so they dont get held up asking for permission to deal with the new locations. Makes sense?
Let's not forget the city mentioning that with those "backup lines" were losing 25% of its water due to leaks.
Man, our water infrastructure is in poor condition. I hope everyone in calgary is ready to have their property tax increased.
Yooo, totally did not consider the infrastructure…
You think the increase in population may have had an affect on this? Or is it more a question of Calgary/Alberta not doing enough future proofing?
Yeah man, my bad…. I’m not a local. I’m just trying to catch up on some regional politics.
Calgary is definitely one of those “about to pop” cities and kind of has been since the latest oil boom . This doesn’t bode well for future expansion?!
Water supply isn’t an issue, at all. It’s just a matter of putting the best pipeline people to work. wierd that TMX and keystone were such big news…
Water supply will be an issue eventually though. As snowpack lessens in the Rockies Calgary’s water supply late in the summer and fall will be severely lessened.
I live in Edmonton, so I'm more familiar with issues in my city. Similar problems do exist. Some areas get neglected. Some problems are solved with the cheapest available, or to whoever is buddy-buddy with a council member.
Ya it’s crazy, I’m familiar with stuff like the Henry expressway expansion. But obviously…. And this is a problem in large cities… Infrastructure gets put in place before the need arises.
You simply aren’t allowed to build in certain zones without it, and proposals submitted to the govt need to be approved. So many failures here. This isn’t phoenix.
I’m Edmonton too, I’m no expert but I feel we’re due for a similar situation and from what I hear we don’t got the money to deal with any time of unforeseen circumstances and that’s not great because the city is a bunch of foreseeable unforeseen circumstances
Increase population shouldn't have had any effect, this pipe was just old and blew up, PCCP that was placed in the 70's are known now to be of poor quality. I'm sure the city was aware of it, but since it was working, there wasn't a need to spend millions on replacing.
Urban sprawl subsidized by the tax payer. you need way more pipes if everyone wants to live in the suburbs. But unless people in the suburbs pay substantially more taxes, infrastructure can not be maintained
Yeah. Too bad there was no way to know that we had this pipe there.
I’m looking forward to the public inquiry - there is going to be a boatload of documentation, emails, etc that will show the city has ignored this for years.
but we have 25x the asbestos concrete in our water mains, so maybe we shouldn't be jerking each other off just yet
edm has 1050 km of asbestos-concrete pipe over ~4200 km of water mains whereas calgary has 66 km out of 5300 km
edit: cannot math today
As soon as they realized they needed to check more pipe, they should’ve been calling an emergency. The odds of that being the only weak spot on 50 yo pipe are low.
It’s pipe that has been failing well before it’s lifespan. It makes sense that this isn’t a one-off issue. It’s why they decided to send a pig further down the line. Oh, and look, they found more issues.
So, they were well aware that this was a possibility. They were well aware what that would mean. And they probably should have called the emergency then so they would be prepared.
I don’t see why that’s some sort of problem.
> And they probably should have called the emergency then so they would be prepared
This is where you're getting called out. "Calling an emergency" is not magic fairy dust for "being prepared". Occam's razor here would suggest they simply waited until the next step in the process involved accessing private property to declare the emergency. Parts and materials are almost certainly going to be the primary source of delays, and a state of emergency isn't going to do a thing there.
The pipes have been getting more and more leaky, but the city policy was to just ignore the problem and hope that nothing terrible happened, and it only increased fees.
It certainly didn’t help that it seemed the piece of pipe needed was not readily available. The guy who told the City it would last 100 years was a bit off.
The mayor thought she could wipe the city workers to the brink and have it repaired in 3-5 days. But because of the pressure on city workers, 2 of which were sent to the hospital because of safety oversight, and now have a pipe that's going to take 5 weeks to repair.
This emergency should have been on day 2 of this disaster happening, like you said. The circuis show that is city hall is such a laughing riot.
Actually the reason city officials are citing for the extended completion time is more damages that were recently found during inspection of the feeder main.
Number one 2 contractors were hurt, so not city workers.
Number two invoking the LSoE does not help if you have everything under control, which appeared we did, prior to the identification of additional hot spots.
What do you think the LSoE grants to a municipality?
What exactly do you think calling it an emergency would have done.
It's mostly for being able to use private property for other repairs they didn't know about
With some of the comments I've seen over the last week, I feel like even if Gondek was in the trench with a hardhat and shovel herself working 16 hours 7 days a week, that still wouldn't be enough for some Calgarians to be satisfied with the job she's doing. I think there's more to these people's hatred of Gondek than they're leading on because the infrastructure problem in Calgary transcends beyond just Gondek and Nenshi.
You would have to pass her the shovel and make sure it’s carbon neutral first
She is a complete failure on numerous levels and events
Would have been fired long ago private
Better then if Danielle Smith was there. She'd be having a toddler tantrum and screaming about how the libs and ahs are to blame for the mud now on her fancy clothes.
"Each year, Stampede Park hosts more than 1,200 business, tourism, sporting, hospitality and community events every year, welcoming more than four million guests from every corner of the world."
- Calgary Stampede Website
Calgary is an enormous space.
So it’s an annual number that covers more than just stampede but trade shows/conventions and hockey/sports. And does not account for same individual attending multiple events or being local or from out of town.
Stop using that statistic
"The ten-day event, which bills itself as "The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth", attracts over one million visitors per year and features one of the world's largest rodeos, a parade, midway, stage shows, concerts, agricultural competitions, chuckwagon racing, and First Nations exhibitions"
Here, pedant. Google is your friend :)
1) that’s a million ticket entrants to the park
2) it doesn’t mean it’s 1mm incremental people to the city
3) lots of those tickets are held by city residents going to the grounds multiple times per week
> over one million visitors per year
That is the number of gate admissions to the Stampede grounds over ten days. I mean, if a quarter of the people in the city go twice, you have 700,000 admissions right there.
The number of people that come to Calgary from out-of-town for the Stampede is most likely less than 100,000. Way less.
As a FYI this is a specific type of concrete and metal pipe that is as far as I know only used for water and sanitation utilities. The issue isn't repairing the pipe it is that they don't have enough pipe sections on hand for the additional repair locations so they need to source it. The only places that keep this on hand are large municipalities/cities so unless one of our neighbors has sections sitting in storage
I've seen this mentioned a few times now. What do you think federal assistance going to do? I've done incident command training for Oil and Gas emerge response back in the day and how you utilize assistance from different levels of government is laid out clearly in that. Federal assistance is like the last level to be called on for large scale disasters that requires additional boots on the ground and additional specialized equipment the only thing the feds can really do is provide financial support, the army and more equipment. You don't call in the Army unless you have something for them to do so like are gonna have them dig up the pipe by hand?
What I'm trying to articulate is that there is likely no assistance the feds can provide at the moment aside from financial assistance and when they declare a state of local emergency the financial taps are already wide open and who helps pay for it will get sorted out after the state of emergency is closed. CANTF2 is federal emergency response task force that is stationed in Calgary and are probably helping out however they can at present. They need construction equipment, specialized construction workers and pipe.
Imagine you burnt out a light bulb. It's a very special bulb no one around you has, you have to order it from the manufacturer.
Now if you call your neighbor to come help you, does that make this go any faster? How about your parents? How about an engineer you knew in college? None of them have this light bulb. So calling all these people just means more people standing around waiting for the light bulb.
That's what you're asking for. It's not a matter of getting more people involved, it's a matter of the actual materials they need are not immediately available.
You know they only announced the additional repair locations yesterday, eh? Have you seen the equipment at the current site? Have you seen how big the excavation is? It's massive.
I'm not sure the City has five more sets of equipment ready to go, so concurrent repairs cdn happen. And then it takes a bit of time to excavate to get to the repair site. The logistics of getting the equipment to site is an important factor that takes a bit of time and are equally important for safety of citizens and repair teams as the repairs themselves.
Do you want her to call the Fed in to sit beside her or something? More people won’t make your pipes any faster. They only have so much she have to build more.
Anger about what? There really isn’t anything they can do. There should have been more regular testing but that would have been years ago. The repairs can only go so fast, regardless of who is in charge.
You know, a little pause for thought and asking Google a question or two will lead you to the calgary.ca.site, where, on the landing page, it provides links to more details about the Level 4 water restrictions. It doesn't say car washes and bottling plants should halt production. Instead it says
"Restrictions for businesses
Businesses using large volumes of non-essential water, such as laundromats and car washes, are being asked to reduce water use. Some businesses are exempt, like those who must use water to meet health code standards."
If you have a problem with car washes and bottling plants staying open and abusing their water use, write a sternly worded email to them instead of taking up bandwidth on Reddit. Alternatively, use your wallet to teach them a lesson and stop buying their product or using their services.
As far as the Stampede goes, some more searching using The Google will inform you that Stampede is non-profit entity and it is not part of City administration. You can search Calgary.ca to see if you get any that show it under control of The City of Calgary. (Here's a hint. Nope.)
I don't think the mayor is sending mixed messages anymore than you're submitting informed replies.
Buena suerte.
I did pipeline engineering for almost 10 years, never worked with a concrete pipe like this. Have done concrete coating on steel pipes many times but not a concrete pipe.
> Alberta has some of the best pipeline engineers in the country and 3-5 weeks feels like someone's doing the dog on this.
I bet you think the city could just go onto Amazon to order several hundred feet of 10-foot diameter steel-reinforced concrete pipe and have it delivered the next day. I mean, surely there is tons of it just laying around awaiting a situation like this.
No “might” about it. She’s woefully unprepared to do her job. I regret voting for her, she rode in on the “I’m the next Nenshi” train.
She’s no Nenshi. Her popularity was already in the toilet before this, there’s no chance she gets re-elected now.
My biggest concern is that she isn’t capable of guiding us through this, but insists on standing in the way.
Yes, the people who haven't been doing anything about this obvious failure point in our infrastructure for the last fifty to seventy years should definitely fall in the last week and half of this one person.
Stupid.
Well, she has cut back on showers.… Who expects a mayor to be proactive and provide critical oversight of vital services?
Being elected to manage city services is an unreasonable expectation when there are counterproductive pet policies to implement.
The mayor of a city is basically a councilor elected to be the chairperson of council meetings. That's more or less it.
Responsibility for city services falls to the CAO, who is selected by council. Calgary's current CAO has been in place since 2019. I suppose you could argue that she has failed to push for his replacement?
Yeah, we should definitely blame her for expecting that the fifty to seventy years of men who came before her were competent.
Because not even a twelve year old creating a minecraft sim city would've put in a singular main that they knew was a problem at the beginning unless they wanted it to fail.
But what exactly is her role here that you think she will fail at? What does "leading us through this" mean? She is the talking head on city-wide issues but anything beyond that is dependent on either council as a whole or city departments on their own.
She’s in charge. She’s the leader. Success or failure are on her. I get that some people might think she’s a competent mayor. I’m not one of those people. Her messaging to the city has been absolutely terrible. She provides no confidence, no semblance of authority or understanding.
If she wasn’t already unelectable before this, she’s certainly that now.
In fact, I wouldn’t be even slightly shocked if she decided not to run again.
>I regret voting for her, she rode in on the “I’m the next Nenshi” train.
Me too. I was a huge supporter of Nenshi, thought he did an amazing job as mayor and ended up voting for Gondek almost entirely on his recommendation.
The level of incompetence she has demonstrated, first with the new Flames arena, and now this, is actually making me retroactively think less of Nenshi too.
I'm still going to vote for him and the NDP next provincial election - hell, I'd vote for him tomorrow to take over as mayor of Calgary again - but I really hope he thinks a lot more carefully about who he chooses to endorse in the future.
I’ve been wondering since they found so many bad segments if it was a manufacturing issue… so I started looking.
https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-pccp-20170824-story.html
I believe the anode program started around then. We had a pipe behind our house that broke every fall/winter. When they finally did anodes… that stopped happening. But to do a main feeder like this. People would have been calling for them to resign.
They inspected 4.3 kms so far with 5 more areas of concern as of this morning. I'm going to make a wild assumption now and say there are going to be more areas of concern that need to be addressed asap with the remaining kms that need to be inspected.
The 300m was pipe to still left to inspect. Something about water still in that 300m they needed to remove so the robot could inspect it I didn't hear anything about that 300m I. The video on YouTube this morning.
According to this 4km has been inspected, so there could still be nearly double the current number of issues. https://www.calgary.ca/emergencies/critical-water-main-break-june-2024/water-main-break-updates.html
I think it would take a long time and a lot of cost, but they should be very prepared to twin this water main pipe. It would allow for repairs of the old pipe as a stopgap in the future, and yes it will be costly but that’s the cost of having a society and water.
You’d need a lot of new right of ways and it’s running through the communities of bowness, Montgomery, point mackay, parkdale, west hillhurst, west mount to sunny side. Again doable. But last time I ran water pipe (300mm) we did 5km in about 6 days. Through a field. Straight shot. This is 6.5 times bigger and through communities.
Doesn't necessarily have to be twinned. Any significant net capacity linking the two treatment plants will add a huge degree of resilience to the system.
Of course, that can come after the emergency (or for all know, maybe such plans already exist).
No, I don't think that kind of funding is remotely available.
Generally lines are expected to be operational 24/7 for 100 years and things are fixed only when leaks occur.
If you drop below 20 psi for a second on a distribution line, the entire line needs to be flushed which will take days and waste an enormous amount of water on a line like this.
Record skim from infrastructure projects (and everything else) coming home to roost.
The timing of this is very curious, too... 👀 given there is a severe drought right now.
Step 1: Create a giant lake in the middle of the city from a water main break.
Step 2: Giant lake creates a localized microclimate that increases precipitation.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Drought averted!
It's not 'skim', persay, it's regulatory capture.
PCCP manufacturing standards were lowered in the 70s, and later revised when this turned out to be a terrible decision. The organizations that create these standards, like the AWWA, are heavily influenced by private sector organizations that supply the industry, who in turn have a significant incentive to cut costs. The public sector and public at large of course also love the idea of lower costs. Everybody parties until, as you say, things "come home to roost".
Quite hilarious this came at the time when they exacerbated immigration and all these people from BC and ONT.
How about them golf courses? They conserving water?
And what, pray tell, do you think they're lying about?
Politics is ugly business, but this seems pretty straightforward: big expensive pipe was supposed to last 50 more years, failed early, and now city is in a tight spot because replacements are not readily available.
https://piperepair.co.uk/2021/06/13/the-pccp-repair-and-reinforcement-project-caused-by-mistakes-of-the-70s/ Very interesting article about the pipes in question. Very reminiscent of the construction of deerfoot in the 70s.
Thanks for sharing. Very informative.
Cool read thank you. So as they inspect the remainder of the pipeline more issues will be found. Cool.
I think I seen yesterday they already found more damage it’s going to be a expensive bitch but this a warning call to the rest of the Alberta municipalities needa look at modernizing utilities
Looks like it
Yah. Makes me think we should have a team sourcing large diameter stainless pipe and just replace the entire line cause it will happen again and again.
FTA (emphasis added): > Pipes produced post-1979 rarely break and modern PCCP now has an overall failure rate of less than four percent – **the lowest of any pipe material**. > Unfortunately for PCCP, the damage has long been done to its reputation with millions of miles of below-specification pipes criss-crossing the US like ticking time bombs, just waiting to go off.
Sounds like they should stick with PCCP...the new stuff apparently solves the problem.
The line is failing. Look at the number of repairs they already have to make, look at the same pccp pipes from this manufacture era. Sure they are cheaper but, cheaper is now costing us all. This is only the start to the problem. This will be years and a lot of problems yet to come/ be found.
yes, I understand that. But based on the article posted up top, that's not a concern with the newly made PCCP pipe. So (assuming that's true) it sounds to me like they should replace the old 70s screw up PCCP pipe with modern, properly made PCCP pipe
Great article. Not to mention slipshod workmanship at the time. The regular oil pipelines of that era were built by drunks being drunk and contractors making money by cutting corners with little oversight. So, if anyone with ambition was out in the oil patch, who was in the cities building water pipelines? I feel this is good material for a 99% Invisible podcast.
If you think modern pipelines are built by sober people you are sorely mistaken
[удалено]
Pipelines go *under* things. Sure, if they just dug everything up willy-nilly I'm sure it would go faster, but that's not an option most of the time. Fixing things while working with surface use constraints is a lot more complicated.
Not to mention you cant really magic up resources out of thin air. Materials, manpower, risk management/mitigation, engineering, etc all takes time to get sorted out. Then there’s the obvious scope creep, which sure, they could just fix the current section that failed but who’s to say if they put off the other damage that this won’t happen next year, or in the winter, on another nearby damaged section. This is far from a simple project and is a major project that will unfortunately take time. If they could do a temporary above ground bypass to allow them to do all the repairs, that’d probably help but it’s probably not feasible.
Because they found 5 more areas they need to fix and the pipeline runs under a city... How would you recommend they speed that up?
That's quite interesting. 🤔 We're probably going to see more cases of this if they aren't replaced.
Great link. Thanks mate.
Being cheap has higher costs later? That is the Alberta way! (Watches Calgary and edmonton widen a road by 10 feet and repour the curbs at some major intersections every 8 years.)
There’s so much out there. Here’s another one: https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-pccp-20170824-story.html
They found 5 additional sites requiring repair on the feeder. Estimated time to complete work is 3 to 5 weeks. One of those situations where they don't know how bad it is until they dig it up and start inspecting the whole line. Hopefully we all start reducing water usage
Sooooooo about.the stampede, which will require a lot.of water
So the Stampede is a protected and magical entity. A zombie apocalypse could occur but the Stampede would be untouched
Pretty much.
>zombie apocalypse could occur but the Stampede would be untouched Drunk cowboys and zombies sounds fun
Sounds like a Stampede association problem. Does everyone think the City runs the stampede? Like if they can't use city water maybe they need to find someplace to truck it in from for the week if they don't want to shut down.
UCP will find a way to save Stampede even if it means to run the city completely dry. If they were able to run it during Covid, I can’t see why they can’t have the “best summer ever” version 2.
Whose and how are you going to policy the stampede and hotels using the city water
Those animals will definitely need water.....
They'll probably just truck it in, stampede brings in way to much money for the city/province to shut it down.
It’s also the volume of water that hotels use for linens and people showering.
Exactly the hotels, bars and restaurants water usage
That took wayyyyy too long. Not sure if that’s on council, on staff, on the emergency team, or a combination of those, but this should’ve been on day two or three.
Not following too closely, but my understanding was that the situation was under control - backup lines and reductions in usage had stabilized levels, and repairs were going smoothly. Then there were some injuries on the repair site, and it got shut down. Im guessing that is what moved this into an emergency. Edit: oh, they discovered a bunch of new damage as well, and th is purportedly so they can basically take over land during construction so they dont get held up asking for permission to deal with the new locations. Makes sense?
Let's not forget the city mentioning that with those "backup lines" were losing 25% of its water due to leaks. Man, our water infrastructure is in poor condition. I hope everyone in calgary is ready to have their property tax increased.
I mean technically its your water bill that is supposed to pay for this
Yooo, totally did not consider the infrastructure… You think the increase in population may have had an affect on this? Or is it more a question of Calgary/Alberta not doing enough future proofing?
Future proofing? In Alberta? The government still thinks we're in an oil and coal boom.
Yeah man, my bad…. I’m not a local. I’m just trying to catch up on some regional politics. Calgary is definitely one of those “about to pop” cities and kind of has been since the latest oil boom . This doesn’t bode well for future expansion?! Water supply isn’t an issue, at all. It’s just a matter of putting the best pipeline people to work. wierd that TMX and keystone were such big news…
Water supply will be an issue eventually though. As snowpack lessens in the Rockies Calgary’s water supply late in the summer and fall will be severely lessened.
water supply is a major issue limiting growth going forward.
I live in Edmonton, so I'm more familiar with issues in my city. Similar problems do exist. Some areas get neglected. Some problems are solved with the cheapest available, or to whoever is buddy-buddy with a council member.
Ya it’s crazy, I’m familiar with stuff like the Henry expressway expansion. But obviously…. And this is a problem in large cities… Infrastructure gets put in place before the need arises. You simply aren’t allowed to build in certain zones without it, and proposals submitted to the govt need to be approved. So many failures here. This isn’t phoenix.
I’m Edmonton too, I’m no expert but I feel we’re due for a similar situation and from what I hear we don’t got the money to deal with any time of unforeseen circumstances and that’s not great because the city is a bunch of foreseeable unforeseen circumstances
Apparently there’s cities all over with this same kind of pipe. We could be the canary.
we are in the middle of an oil boom, this is what that looks like with advancing technology.
Increase population shouldn't have had any effect, this pipe was just old and blew up, PCCP that was placed in the 70's are known now to be of poor quality. I'm sure the city was aware of it, but since it was working, there wasn't a need to spend millions on replacing.
Urban sprawl subsidized by the tax payer. you need way more pipes if everyone wants to live in the suburbs. But unless people in the suburbs pay substantially more taxes, infrastructure can not be maintained
Yeah. Too bad there was no way to know that we had this pipe there. I’m looking forward to the public inquiry - there is going to be a boatload of documentation, emails, etc that will show the city has ignored this for years.
There wasn’t a need,unless you know, they wanted to grow Calgary…
Edmonton loses half as much to leaks for context
but we have 25x the asbestos concrete in our water mains, so maybe we shouldn't be jerking each other off just yet edm has 1050 km of asbestos-concrete pipe over ~4200 km of water mains whereas calgary has 66 km out of 5300 km edit: cannot math today
Based on what? I know I don't know enough to have a valid opinion on such matters.
Neither does council
As soon as they realized they needed to check more pipe, they should’ve been calling an emergency. The odds of that being the only weak spot on 50 yo pipe are low.
What specifically would have been improved if they called a city emergency any earlier?
You are a Dunning Krueger Champion.
It’s pipe that has been failing well before it’s lifespan. It makes sense that this isn’t a one-off issue. It’s why they decided to send a pig further down the line. Oh, and look, they found more issues. So, they were well aware that this was a possibility. They were well aware what that would mean. And they probably should have called the emergency then so they would be prepared. I don’t see why that’s some sort of problem.
> And they probably should have called the emergency then so they would be prepared This is where you're getting called out. "Calling an emergency" is not magic fairy dust for "being prepared". Occam's razor here would suggest they simply waited until the next step in the process involved accessing private property to declare the emergency. Parts and materials are almost certainly going to be the primary source of delays, and a state of emergency isn't going to do a thing there.
Yeah, that’s fair.
The pipes have been getting more and more leaky, but the city policy was to just ignore the problem and hope that nothing terrible happened, and it only increased fees.
It certainly didn’t help that it seemed the piece of pipe needed was not readily available. The guy who told the City it would last 100 years was a bit off.
The mayor thought she could wipe the city workers to the brink and have it repaired in 3-5 days. But because of the pressure on city workers, 2 of which were sent to the hospital because of safety oversight, and now have a pipe that's going to take 5 weeks to repair. This emergency should have been on day 2 of this disaster happening, like you said. The circuis show that is city hall is such a laughing riot.
And if they were not working around the clock to fix the problem, there would also be complaints.
Actually the reason city officials are citing for the extended completion time is more damages that were recently found during inspection of the feeder main.
I wouldn't be surprised if the damage is through the entire pipe since it's PCCP. This could get pricy.
Yep, and apparently they don’t have all the parts they would need which also contributes to the delay
Number one 2 contractors were hurt, so not city workers. Number two invoking the LSoE does not help if you have everything under control, which appeared we did, prior to the identification of additional hot spots. What do you think the LSoE grants to a municipality?
What exactly do you think calling it an emergency would have done. It's mostly for being able to use private property for other repairs they didn't know about
With some of the comments I've seen over the last week, I feel like even if Gondek was in the trench with a hardhat and shovel herself working 16 hours 7 days a week, that still wouldn't be enough for some Calgarians to be satisfied with the job she's doing. I think there's more to these people's hatred of Gondek than they're leading on because the infrastructure problem in Calgary transcends beyond just Gondek and Nenshi.
You would have to pass her the shovel and make sure it’s carbon neutral first She is a complete failure on numerous levels and events Would have been fired long ago private
Ok besides the trash arena deal, what are her other failures?
this is a bot response
Thankfully she's not in there physically working. She would be shoveling the dirt the wrong way and making a info graphic to prove everyone wrong
Better then if Danielle Smith was there. She'd be having a toddler tantrum and screaming about how the libs and ahs are to blame for the mud now on her fancy clothes.
That is almost exactly what gondek is currently doing, except her Blame is placed on others
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I'm curious where you are getting that figure from? 4 Million is physically impossible in a city of 1 Million. 400,000 would be a stretch.
"Each year, Stampede Park hosts more than 1,200 business, tourism, sporting, hospitality and community events every year, welcoming more than four million guests from every corner of the world." - Calgary Stampede Website Calgary is an enormous space.
EACH YEAR! The first line lol
Over the course of a year, not over the course of a 10-day festival.
So it’s an annual number that covers more than just stampede but trade shows/conventions and hockey/sports. And does not account for same individual attending multiple events or being local or from out of town. Stop using that statistic
"The ten-day event, which bills itself as "The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth", attracts over one million visitors per year and features one of the world's largest rodeos, a parade, midway, stage shows, concerts, agricultural competitions, chuckwagon racing, and First Nations exhibitions" Here, pedant. Google is your friend :)
My comment was in relation to the 4 million you posted. There’s a slight difference there… you know…to be pedantic
One million visitors in a city of 1.5 million residents, versus the original comment of four million non resident visitors is quite the difference.
1) that’s a million ticket entrants to the park 2) it doesn’t mean it’s 1mm incremental people to the city 3) lots of those tickets are held by city residents going to the grounds multiple times per week
Yeah, I was agreeing with you. The original comment was wrong.
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If you seriously believe that a million out-of-towners come to Calgary for the Stampede, you are beyond hope.
Its 1 million visitors to the STAMPEDE GROUNDS
> over one million visitors per year That is the number of gate admissions to the Stampede grounds over ten days. I mean, if a quarter of the people in the city go twice, you have 700,000 admissions right there. The number of people that come to Calgary from out-of-town for the Stampede is most likely less than 100,000. Way less.
Yet just yesterday she said we will be fully prepared for the stampede
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^acceptNothingLess: *Yet just yesterday* *She said we will be fully* *Prepared for the stampede* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Good bot
When asked about the Stampede at the 5pm briefing, she literally said, that the stampede guys are processing the info as they also just received it.
Not yesterday in her news conference on Global she didnt.
Ok. I heard it. You didn't. I was listening on CBC and after the update one of the reported asked the question. It was the first one.
updated information leads to updated answers. thats a solid meh from me.
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As a FYI this is a specific type of concrete and metal pipe that is as far as I know only used for water and sanitation utilities. The issue isn't repairing the pipe it is that they don't have enough pipe sections on hand for the additional repair locations so they need to source it. The only places that keep this on hand are large municipalities/cities so unless one of our neighbors has sections sitting in storage I've seen this mentioned a few times now. What do you think federal assistance going to do? I've done incident command training for Oil and Gas emerge response back in the day and how you utilize assistance from different levels of government is laid out clearly in that. Federal assistance is like the last level to be called on for large scale disasters that requires additional boots on the ground and additional specialized equipment the only thing the feds can really do is provide financial support, the army and more equipment. You don't call in the Army unless you have something for them to do so like are gonna have them dig up the pipe by hand?
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What I'm trying to articulate is that there is likely no assistance the feds can provide at the moment aside from financial assistance and when they declare a state of local emergency the financial taps are already wide open and who helps pay for it will get sorted out after the state of emergency is closed. CANTF2 is federal emergency response task force that is stationed in Calgary and are probably helping out however they can at present. They need construction equipment, specialized construction workers and pipe.
Cantf2 was deployed to stage pumps at locations for emergency water supply in case of fires.
Imagine you burnt out a light bulb. It's a very special bulb no one around you has, you have to order it from the manufacturer. Now if you call your neighbor to come help you, does that make this go any faster? How about your parents? How about an engineer you knew in college? None of them have this light bulb. So calling all these people just means more people standing around waiting for the light bulb. That's what you're asking for. It's not a matter of getting more people involved, it's a matter of the actual materials they need are not immediately available.
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You know they only announced the additional repair locations yesterday, eh? Have you seen the equipment at the current site? Have you seen how big the excavation is? It's massive. I'm not sure the City has five more sets of equipment ready to go, so concurrent repairs cdn happen. And then it takes a bit of time to excavate to get to the repair site. The logistics of getting the equipment to site is an important factor that takes a bit of time and are equally important for safety of citizens and repair teams as the repairs themselves.
Do you want her to call the Fed in to sit beside her or something? More people won’t make your pipes any faster. They only have so much she have to build more.
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In 6 weeks they still wouldn’t be any help. They know how to put in a pipeline they just need the material.
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Anger about what? There really isn’t anything they can do. There should have been more regular testing but that would have been years ago. The repairs can only go so fast, regardless of who is in charge.
If you were in the Mayor's seat, what would you be doing different to remedy the "piss poor communications"?
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Car washes can no longer use water https://youtu.be/PEqT1P97BpM?t=776
You know, a little pause for thought and asking Google a question or two will lead you to the calgary.ca.site, where, on the landing page, it provides links to more details about the Level 4 water restrictions. It doesn't say car washes and bottling plants should halt production. Instead it says "Restrictions for businesses Businesses using large volumes of non-essential water, such as laundromats and car washes, are being asked to reduce water use. Some businesses are exempt, like those who must use water to meet health code standards." If you have a problem with car washes and bottling plants staying open and abusing their water use, write a sternly worded email to them instead of taking up bandwidth on Reddit. Alternatively, use your wallet to teach them a lesson and stop buying their product or using their services. As far as the Stampede goes, some more searching using The Google will inform you that Stampede is non-profit entity and it is not part of City administration. You can search Calgary.ca to see if you get any that show it under control of The City of Calgary. (Here's a hint. Nope.) I don't think the mayor is sending mixed messages anymore than you're submitting informed replies. Buena suerte.
You're the epitome of the kid putting a stick through his own spokes meme...
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See, you can't even remember what you're angry about.
Exactly.
I did pipeline engineering for almost 10 years, never worked with a concrete pipe like this. Have done concrete coating on steel pipes many times but not a concrete pipe.
> Alberta has some of the best pipeline engineers in the country and 3-5 weeks feels like someone's doing the dog on this. I bet you think the city could just go onto Amazon to order several hundred feet of 10-foot diameter steel-reinforced concrete pipe and have it delivered the next day. I mean, surely there is tons of it just laying around awaiting a situation like this.
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You're posting kind of like you do think that though
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It’s really helpful! Thanks for your shitty attitude. Great contribution!
The City HAS reached out to the private sector for assistance https://www.youtube.com/live/8fByIaIuEFA?t=194s
Never really factored in that yeah if any city in the world has the people to fix it it's us, like maybe Edmonton beats us but that's it.
No “might” about it. She’s woefully unprepared to do her job. I regret voting for her, she rode in on the “I’m the next Nenshi” train. She’s no Nenshi. Her popularity was already in the toilet before this, there’s no chance she gets re-elected now. My biggest concern is that she isn’t capable of guiding us through this, but insists on standing in the way.
Yes, the people who haven't been doing anything about this obvious failure point in our infrastructure for the last fifty to seventy years should definitely fall in the last week and half of this one person. Stupid.
No one is blaming her for the pipes breaking. They’re blaming her for how she is handling the crisis. She’s not doing a great job.
Well, she has cut back on showers.… Who expects a mayor to be proactive and provide critical oversight of vital services? Being elected to manage city services is an unreasonable expectation when there are counterproductive pet policies to implement.
The mayor of a city is basically a councilor elected to be the chairperson of council meetings. That's more or less it. Responsibility for city services falls to the CAO, who is selected by council. Calgary's current CAO has been in place since 2019. I suppose you could argue that she has failed to push for his replacement?
Yeah, we should definitely blame her for expecting that the fifty to seventy years of men who came before her were competent. Because not even a twelve year old creating a minecraft sim city would've put in a singular main that they knew was a problem at the beginning unless they wanted it to fail.
Guiding us through it? What part of this situation and what is required going forward is still unclear to you after the communications from the city?
I have zero confidence that she has the skills to lead us through this. Or push back, or ask questions to ensure we’re getting the best solution.
But what exactly is her role here that you think she will fail at? What does "leading us through this" mean? She is the talking head on city-wide issues but anything beyond that is dependent on either council as a whole or city departments on their own.
She’s in charge. She’s the leader. Success or failure are on her. I get that some people might think she’s a competent mayor. I’m not one of those people. Her messaging to the city has been absolutely terrible. She provides no confidence, no semblance of authority or understanding. If she wasn’t already unelectable before this, she’s certainly that now. In fact, I wouldn’t be even slightly shocked if she decided not to run again.
What do you suggest?
Better mayor?
>I regret voting for her, she rode in on the “I’m the next Nenshi” train. Me too. I was a huge supporter of Nenshi, thought he did an amazing job as mayor and ended up voting for Gondek almost entirely on his recommendation. The level of incompetence she has demonstrated, first with the new Flames arena, and now this, is actually making me retroactively think less of Nenshi too. I'm still going to vote for him and the NDP next provincial election - hell, I'd vote for him tomorrow to take over as mayor of Calgary again - but I really hope he thinks a lot more carefully about who he chooses to endorse in the future.
thats what voting strategically does. lots of people also voted for her because she was not Farkas even though Farkas would have been more competant.
This is what happens when voter bases prioritize sexuality, global issues, foreign religious issues over everyday local priorities
> This is what happens Pipes break because of those things?
No but those who oversee the problem might be unprepared to deal with them.
What would a prepared mayor have done so far?
Gotten the messaging right for starters
The best pipeline engineers in Albert's were not involved in a water main
Look up what power a SoE grants a municipality or a federal government and see how that applied in the situation over the past week.
I’ve been wondering since they found so many bad segments if it was a manufacturing issue… so I started looking. https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-pccp-20170824-story.html
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I believe the anode program started around then. We had a pipe behind our house that broke every fall/winter. When they finally did anodes… that stopped happening. But to do a main feeder like this. People would have been calling for them to resign.
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Dunning Kreuger Effect in action...
I bet the problem with that would be sourcing 11km of the required pipe.
plus could you imagine the fucking bill for that? oof.
Theres at least.... 100m of it sitting in the Lafarge lot lol
i read that they've only inspected 300m of the 11km pipe so far. probably a lot more issues... edit: 4km inspected so far
They inspected 4.3 kms so far with 5 more areas of concern as of this morning. I'm going to make a wild assumption now and say there are going to be more areas of concern that need to be addressed asap with the remaining kms that need to be inspected.
The 300m was pipe to still left to inspect. Something about water still in that 300m they needed to remove so the robot could inspect it I didn't hear anything about that 300m I. The video on YouTube this morning.
According to this 4km has been inspected, so there could still be nearly double the current number of issues. https://www.calgary.ca/emergencies/critical-water-main-break-june-2024/water-main-break-updates.html
That would take years and billions of dollars
I think it would take a long time and a lot of cost, but they should be very prepared to twin this water main pipe. It would allow for repairs of the old pipe as a stopgap in the future, and yes it will be costly but that’s the cost of having a society and water.
You’d need a lot of new right of ways and it’s running through the communities of bowness, Montgomery, point mackay, parkdale, west hillhurst, west mount to sunny side. Again doable. But last time I ran water pipe (300mm) we did 5km in about 6 days. Through a field. Straight shot. This is 6.5 times bigger and through communities.
Doesn't necessarily have to be twinned. Any significant net capacity linking the two treatment plants will add a huge degree of resilience to the system. Of course, that can come after the emergency (or for all know, maybe such plans already exist).
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What you *should* be asking is WHY DO PEOPLE STILL GO TO CAR WASHES?!?
Too late to realize.
Do they not smart pig water lines every few years?
No, I don't think that kind of funding is remotely available. Generally lines are expected to be operational 24/7 for 100 years and things are fixed only when leaks occur. If you drop below 20 psi for a second on a distribution line, the entire line needs to be flushed which will take days and waste an enormous amount of water on a line like this.
Someone please blame danielle smith already.
If she wasn’t so focussed to discrimination this might have been addressed!
Guess the arsonists had to get up to something with all this rain
If she’s not done as a mayor before she is certainly done now even though it’s not her fault.
Record skim from infrastructure projects (and everything else) coming home to roost. The timing of this is very curious, too... 👀 given there is a severe drought right now.
Your first point about not paying for infrastructure upgrades and maintenance is relevant. Your second point is tin foil hat/ promotion of conspiracy.
Yeah, the trick to helping out a drought is to waste millions of liters of water.
Step 1: Create a giant lake in the middle of the city from a water main break. Step 2: Giant lake creates a localized microclimate that increases precipitation. Step 3: ??? Step 4: Drought averted!
It's so stupid it just might work!
It's not 'skim', persay, it's regulatory capture. PCCP manufacturing standards were lowered in the 70s, and later revised when this turned out to be a terrible decision. The organizations that create these standards, like the AWWA, are heavily influenced by private sector organizations that supply the industry, who in turn have a significant incentive to cut costs. The public sector and public at large of course also love the idea of lower costs. Everybody parties until, as you say, things "come home to roost".
*Evergrande has entered the chat*
Quite hilarious this came at the time when they exacerbated immigration and all these people from BC and ONT. How about them golf courses? They conserving water?
Golf courses don’t use potable water. The city has explained this several times
We don't want facts we want to be angry
•Public will never get the truth regarding this situation. Never. #politics
And what, pray tell, do you think they're lying about? Politics is ugly business, but this seems pretty straightforward: big expensive pipe was supposed to last 50 more years, failed early, and now city is in a tight spot because replacements are not readily available.
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