Certainly, for the benefit of the crews working, water usage is naturally a lot lower in the winter than in the summer though. The system would be less strained in the winter.
It's going to be interesting, the richest communities in Calgary are at the higher elevations. They'll be affected first. Them and anyone on the 4th floor of a 4 story high rise.
I was just looking at the size of pipes around the city. The ones downtown are pretty small, kinda like we’re end of line. I think the ones in the areas furthest from the plants would be impacted first as that’s where the pressure would go first. But no water specialist either.
How about a rebate on those that can show significant water use reductions? The price of water is pretty low on your bill, the fees are the bulk of costs. So, give us a rebate or credit if we've got a 40/50/60% drop in usage. It would be a heck of an incentive.
Also when you get your water bill I doubt it will be much different from an unrestricted month.
Water services budget isn't on the city's ledger. They are a separate entity. They collect their own fee's/taxes along with waste and recycling, thats why it is a separate bill.
It would be concerning if our property taxes were used for water services. It would be misuse of taxpayer dollars.
Water and sewer services are paid for by user fees.
No, they are being used for a climate emergency, arena deal we paid too much for, a green line that isn’t built. You’d think the city should use it for infrastructure upgrades in the city like aging water mains and aging community centres that are in bad shape :s
We're all trying. My showers are now 2 minutes long. Its incredibly inconvenient. I'm collecting rain water in shopping bins so my wife's flowers won't die. We should get some compensation. Service reduced = price reduction.
The City should use carrot/stick approach... If your water usage drops 25% (which was the goal the last time I checked) your billing operates as normal; if your usage does not drop 25% you pay a surcharge for every liter over the reduction goal BUT instead of the city pocketing that surcharge they redistribute it to those whose usage drops more than 25%.
So the nut jobs who are having extra baths just to stick it to the city, thus increasing their water usage, would pay a surcharge proportional to their usage over the reduction goal while those who reduce their usage more than 25% would get credits on their bill (again proportional to their reduction)
Problem with this is the same incentives relativity for anything…
Those who are already performing well have a lower chance of hitting target improvements because there’s less areas for large scale change.
A household with resource conscious folks already observing best practises should not be penalized if they don’t hit a default target that is applied to heavy consumers.
It’d be like charging people who don’t reduce their energy consumption. Some folks can just change some behaviour and reduce, others have been practically applying reduction principles all along.
This would be the rational approach to things. And this would involve someone at the city actually setting up a formula/algorithm for the bills to then be processed this way. They’d have to increase taxes to pull that off.
I see everyone's bill possibly going up to pay for these repairs, nothing is going to come down. Period. This isn't going to be cheap. You can bet that other cities are now looking into their infrastructure and asking "can this happen to us?".
They already are. PCCPs are potentially a ticking time bomb across North America.
There’s so much more if you google PCCP failure:
https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-pccp-20170824-story.html
A rebate for reduced use paid for by an increase for those that don't reduce, so that it's revenue neutral, might help a bit, but might also not be something that's easily accomplished administratively.
Government of Canada had a hard time setting this up for carbon tax , imagine the city trying to actually do this for water lol. They probably don’t even know how to save a document as a PDF.
$30 use of water turns into a $130 bill. You can’t even reduce it to warrant a drop on the bill and while the rebate would be nice.. lol that would ever happen
When it was 5 to 7 days for restoration we simply decided to tough it out
Now that is it 3 to 5 weeks, We have invested close to $400 in rain water capture in the last few days.
Some rebate here would be nice.
I have also started to record the water meter once per day to see how we are performing.
I saw 100 gallon stock tanks on sale at princess auto a while back and am kicking myself. My one rain barrel doesn't cut it, been filling everything I can find with rainwater
Alternatively, if your water usage isn’t significantly reduced, you get a hefty fine. Equally as difficult to enforce but until money is involved, not everyone is going to care/do anything. I’m doing everything I can to conserve water but I just know somebody filled their pool/hot tub today
Or we could be thrilled to do our part in conservation and be honorable citizens. I would get behind 3X water fees applied during this event to residences whose water metres indicated they did NOT make an effort. Our house, verified by daily metre readings, used ~45L per day for 2 adults. I personally am not remotely interested in a rebate, consider it goodwill to your city. Else you have failed your city 😎 - Oliver Queen
I checked my water bill. My actual use is 4000L per month. That's 133L per day, without any active conservation. I don't use any outdoor water, which could be the difference. There are probably hoses and sprinklers that use more than me in a day.
133L is pretty reasonable I think. I checked a few days ago, and my family of 4 is around 500L/day (125L/person) on average through the year, also with no efforts made in conservation. We do have things like a HE washer, and upgraded toilets, so that helps to keep usage down.
It’s bonkers to me to think that 350L/day is average. That’s got to include commercial/industrial usage, doesn’t it?! I would have to make a concerted effort to try to get through that much water on a daily basis.
The commercial use that we don't even see is quite high. Watering plants and trees around the city. Restaurants cooking and cleaning.The delivery truck that needs to get washed / maintained as part of regular service to drop off goods at the grocery store. The grocery store needing to keep fruits and vegetables moist.
I thought I read 231L/person/day, but regardless, still more than enough. The WHO suggested 150L/person/day allows people to live very comfortably. When camping (backcountry backpacking) we realize only 5L are needed a day and are enough for drinking, food prep, washing. Makes me wish there were a way for the city to only allow a certain amount of water (say 50-100L/person/day) run into each residence. Those who get it will know how to best ration it and nit have an issues. The people filling hot tubs and such now will start complaining by 6am when their daily ration is used up. Heck, today I even went for a 10-minute drive as the rain was coming down hard because I figured that will be my car was this month. This week I’ll just wipe the windshield down with some Windex.
Yup, m3 = 1000L. They also have a little graph showing you usage over the last 12 months, which you can use to estimate your average usage (within a a reasonable margin of error; if you want to get precise, you’d have to check each individual bill from the last 12 months.)
It shows around 8-14k L per month recently. Doesn’t make sense. It’s just 2 adults and we usually take short showers and skip taking shower many times when at home. Laundry hardly once per week. Dishwasher also not much use. Water the garden a bit (before restrictions), didn’t water the lawn even once this year yet.
Are we missing something or do we need to check something that may be causing this much water use? The only thing that’s coming to my mind is toilet flushes being inefficient… but so much difference? Moved here around 2.5 yrs ago. Not sure how old they are and I was planning on replacing them anyways. Quick google search shows standard toilets use 7 gallons, and design improvements have reduced that to 1.3-1.6 gallons.
I just checked my bill and it says that I used 14 m3 last month. How in the actual Fuck did I use 14,000 litres!? Thst dosnt seem right at all or my math is way off
Same here. It shows around 8-14k L per month recently. Doesn’t make sense. It’s just 2 adults and we usually take short showers and skip taking shower many times when at home. Laundry hardly once per week. Dishwasher also not much use. Water the garden a bit (before restrictions), didn’t water the lawn even once this year yet.
Are we missing something or do we need to check something that may be causing this much water use? The only thing that’s coming to my mind is toilet flushes being inefficient… but so much difference? Moved here around 2.5 yrs ago. Not sure how old they are and I was planning on replacing them anyways. Quick google search shows standard toilets use 7 gallons, and design improvements have reduced that to 1.3-1.6 gallons.
You yourself can read your water meter. Maybe there is a leak somewhere. Maybe next time you're home alone, turn off anything that uses water, and then read the meter. See if its moving. Your plumbing should have shutoff valves to isolate particular lines.
I did have a leaking toilet, but I e since repaired it with all new parts
Could be thet my shower head and toilets aren't the most efficient but 14k litres completly shocked me
The month before I only used 3000L. Look for the headings “Reading”, “Read Type”, and “Use”. My read type is “Actual” and the math works out (the reading increases by the use).
It’s an average based on population divided by total usage. So includes commercial and industrial use within the total divided by our population. It also includes ‘losses’ whether unaccounted for (leaks) or accounted for (evaporation). The real average number per person without those factors is in many reports different organizations or jurisdictions have published as being perhaps 170 Lpd to 230 Lpd.
I was thinking the same. Living alone, even before this I would only run my dishwasher once a week when it’s completely full, and not have a shower every single day. Now I’ve adjusted to sponge baths, which work just fine, and a couple of toilet flushes only per day. Dishes are wiped off with a damp cloth. I don’t need to make super messy pasta sauce and stuff like that right now. But unfortunately there are way too many entitled people in this city that aren’t even willing to make small adjustments that one really shouldn’t need to discuss. It’s a sad state of society we’re in. Maybe if people had all water and power turned off for a year some of these people would have a better appreciation for things.
50 litres for a load of laundry in a front load machine, 170 litres in a top load machine. 11 litres of water for a load of dishes in a machine. Plus the toilet, water used in cooking, coffee & tea, do you eat fast food? the water from your pop is included in this. Showering, a 10 minute shower is almost 250 litres of water.
Where did you get those figures? A 10 minute continuous shower consumes 94.64 liters of water.
[https://www.omnicalculator.com/everyday-life/bath-vs-shower-footprint](https://www.omnicalculator.com/everyday-life/bath-vs-shower-footprint)
Who does all of those things every, single, day?!
I normally only do a couple loads of laundry a MONTH. Dishes like twice a week. I shower every 2 days.
They might be basing this info off a family of four. I know for a fact I can get away with only doing 2 laundry washes a month and only use the dish washer once a week on a regular. These water restrictions honestly haven’t been that intrusive for me. The only difference I’ve had to make is stopping doing a shower every day and the at- home car wash.
They must be. Any single person using this high of water is insanity, even granting a daily shower. But another set of sheets and wear your clothes more than once ffs 🤦🏼♀️
Maybe not in your home, but you still eat out, use washrooms outside of your home, wash your car, buy local products that require water to either manufacture or clean etc.
I think it’s wrong too but to do some quick math: 9-11 L per flush at about 10-20 flushes per day. On the high end of 11L per flush for 20 flushes that’s 220L based on toileting alone. I think 350 is still high but it seems like flushing after every use is the biggest personal use of filtered water consumption.
I googled average number of flushes and sources say 5. Personally I think that’s low, but let’s say it’s 10 for ease of calculations. Old toilets use up to 11L. New higher efficiency and dual flush toilets as low as 3.5L. So even with old toilets, if a person living alone flushes once in the morning and once at night for the time being, that should at least limit toilet use to max 20L/day. Put some bricks or a bottle filled with water into the toilet tank and it’ll act as displacement to further reduce water. Then, to wash one’s hands, we don’t need to turn a tap on full. You can soap and wash hands under a much lower flow.
One thing I don't understand is this...
The plant still works, it's just a transport issue at this point. Can we not start using tanker trucks (potable trucks) to help transport water from the Bearspaw plant to the remote reservoirs to help stabilize the system?
It won't be much, be at this point doesn't every bit help?
There are no facilities setup to load or unload the trucks at meaningful scale. Unloading the truck increases the risk of contamination of the storage reservoirs.
To off set the increase in water use over the past few days 70 trucks a day would be needed. To get back to normal it would be over 10 times that.
Setting up stations when people could pickup water would be a lot easier, but a major logistics challenge. I'd wait 45 minutes to fill a few jugs but I'm not sure many would unless there was a dire need.
Yeah, and if you have to drive to pick them up, that's another barrier. I don't have a car and there's only so much water I can haul home on the bus or by foot.
Not enough to really make a difference. A good rule of thumb for logistics is that the hierarchy is: Pipeline > Shipping > Rail > Trucks.
The typical water truck you might see out and about has a capacity between about 5 000L and 20 000L. Currently Glenmore is supplying about 480 000 000L/day. Just to move it from 480M L/day to 481M L/day would take about 5 000 trips of the larger water trucks, and not change much of the circumstance. Bumping supply up 5% would look more like 24 000 trips per day, assuming you could find enough of the larger sized trucks, and several times that for smaller trucks. At that point loading and unloading, and traffic control all start to be problems that themselves could take weeks to untangle.
Trucking it around can keep a population at "not dying of dehydration" levels, but it's not going to meaningfully supplement what Glenmore is providing.
Standard bathtub holds 302L. Grab a 3L bottle. Fill up that tub after filling your bottle in the sink. That's how many trips it takes for that 10,000L truck to do a million litres. Now walk to the other end of your community and have it filled at your friend's place. 20min there, 20 min back. This is what you are suggesting to do for those reservoirs, times dozens of trucks.
I did a field trip to the Bearspaw treatment plant. As I recall they have 3 pumps that they cycle through to pump water into this main feeder (so they can be maintained without interrupting supply).
The scale of one of these pumps is about the size of a 2 story house. No truck is going to replace that....
I saw the math for that somewhere yesterday. To transport even 25% would require 20,000 trucks per day. Imagine the complaining of roads clogged up with water trucks non-stop. People don’t realize how much water actually gets used in the city each day.
Agreed. Residents doing their part is a must, but trucking at least SOME of the water from the plant to the reservoirs seems like it could only help, not hurt.
No, it could definitely hurt. If you contaminate a reservoir, guess what? The entire reservoir gets flushed. It could easily make the situation far, far worse.
I left my comment very early in this thread. Since then, many more commenters have made the infeasibility of trucking the water (in any capacity) evident to me. I stand corrected.
Temporary above ground pipelines? Calgary is full of midstream companies. Use for water for now. Don’t know how long something like that would take to set up.
Way too long. Just worked on a project where this was done for less than 500m. You need specific angles in the pipes for water flow, otherwise you need pumping station. Then, where do you run the pipe? Can’t imagine that most would be happy with it being put through the middle of their back yard. You’d be looking at a project many, many times longer in duration.
Oddly, pipelines generally need to be buried for structural reasons. They can support their own dry weight, but water is very heavy, and they are circles. Burying them makes it so the circle doesn't support the water, the ground supports it. We could run some slightly large pipelines above ground, but the break was in a 76" pipe you could drive a truck through. Moving that kind of water takes engineering.
It’s not about getting water they have plenty coming in from the river… the problem is the glenmore is at its maximum capacity with how much water it can supply. This risks things going downhill for glenmore aswell.
This is what I was telling my wife. I pay my taxes and expect at minimum working essentials. Not my issue If the city isn’t prepared for a water break because they spent money on an arena instead.
*"We would have to find* ***some other solution***. I know there's contingency plans. ***I haven't heard what they are***..."
As if the mayor isn't aware that other cities have implemented hard limits and fines for non-compliance. "Mandatory indoor water restrictions" means metre readings & fines. If you have a smart metre, *they know* what your household water usage is. They could just say cut back to 300L per day total, per house, or you get an automatic fine mailed to you like a red light camera ticket.
Limiters and secondary/outdoor water shutoffs for repeat offenders are also plausible, according to news articles about what's already happened in places like Utah, Guelph, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.
I do wonder how this works for large apartment buildings. I don’t pay my own water, it’s included in rent. I don’t think we have individual meters. Would the building itself be fined if water use isn’t properly reduced?
Per household isnt a reasonable expectation. 5 people and 2 dogs live in my home. I dont mind using less water to account for my dog. But if my house has 5 people, and my neighbor has 2, and we both have equal sized houses, then they should be using census data to determine usage.
And my house is a rental, it contains four ‘households’ living under the same roof in four different rentals. They would have to have some way to avoid punishing one for their neighbour’s excessive use. Or fine the landlord, but that’s not super fair either.
Sure as long as there is an appropriate appeals process in place.
Which would overwhelm our courts
To the people downvoting me, do you believe some households should be facing multithousand dollar fines simply because they have more people living in the home?
Would it be fair to fine people for not having a certain number of people living in a home because we are in a housing crisis in canada?
The same folks downvoting you are the same folks that want density density density. Basement suite, garage suite etc all use the same meter. The solution is vote in a competent council who focuses on actual civic governance
Most of the information that I was hoping would be available from the City including details of the pipe, and a highres map of the water system is in this article.
Yes, I am aware of the source. I am referring to how I hoped the City would be the one providing these as part of its communication "strategy". It's like when the Peace Bridge was being built, and there was so much disinformation circulating. It turns out there was a simple document available at the City that outlined the (very practical) reasons and justification for building it, but somehow they never bothered to find a way to communicate it to the public.
Sorry I thought it was clear. The City has been doing a poor job communicating during this crisis, though this seems to be standard operating procedure based on historical examples. It shouldn't take journalists to uncover information that should be readily available to the public from day 1.
Most of the people here didn't read the article, and the city is not helping with its messaging for not explaining the problem like a five year old can understand.
Glenmore Treatment plant can't maintain the water pressure. If everyone in Calgary turned on all their taps at once, the highest and furthest communities will not get water at all. This is the threat.
Water trucks and all these other bonehead comments wont help one bit. Also, Water Services is not part of the City of Calgary's budget, so stop with the stupid cancel arena comments. I have no skin in that game, but the department does not share a budget with the City.
Yeah, this thread and the water crisis in general is really highlighting that for every enlightened, reasonable person out there, there's an ignorant yang that's dumber than a bag of hammers, and more inclined to post.
I was at an event today with some folks in the construction/civil engineering sector and from what I heard, there’s been quite a few local firms who have contacted the city offering up their assistance/manpower and the city will not even return their calls…
If the city already has as much manpower as is helpful, more won’t make it go any faster. As somebody nicely put it today ‘9 women can’t have a baby in one month’. More people on the job isn’t always more useful.
We’re all in this together, so let’s just be more vigilante about our water use. Simple things like turning your taps off when brushing your teeth, cooking, washing the dishes and etc.
Other things like lowering your water levels in your toilet, reusing bath water for your plants and etc can go long way. The more creative we get, the more efficient we can be. Throw in businesses reducing their consumption as well and we’re gonna be just fine.
"Simple things like turning your taps off when brushing your teeth, cooking, washing the dishes and etc."
Who leaves the tap on while brushing their teeth, cooking or washing dishes?! What's the point of doing that, just to deliberately waste water? I don't get this.
I argued with a friend about this the other day. She's from Edmonton and said she was glad she could still run the water while she brushed her teeth and it infuriated me a bit. She said she spits and wants it to get washed down right away, I said turn the tap on and off when you spit. There was no getting through to her though.
I know someone who does that as well and it makes my blood boil. Just seems so wasteful in general. Like, is it too much effort to turn it off and then on again to rinse your toothbrush?
Lots of people. You see it in movies, see it from others. I don’t think it’s even on purpose, it’s probably just out of habit and it just doesn’t register in their mind that water is being wasted.
I guess it's an abundance of endless resources mentality, which would be a wonderfully comforting way to live if one wants to be blissfully ignorant.
These people never learned the 'tragedy of the commons' lesson in school, and based things I've heard in some right-wing churches there's possibly also a "take it, you've earned it" mentality from uneducated and self-centered false religious teachings.
Sadly yes. The city needs to come out with some kind of presser giving people tips on how to be less wasteful. Some people just might not know unless they’re told there’s a better way.
Not taking baths and limiting laundry are two big ones. Filling a tub one third of the way uses approximately 75 litres of water. Top load washers use 110 - 135 litres.
Our mayor and City council haven't exactly been communicating how much of a crisis this truly is. National headlines all week have said Calgarians are asked to take 3 minute showers and only do full loads of laundry. Big deal. If the headlines say Calgary is using 95 to 99% of available water supply (based on sustainable threshold of 485 million litres provided by the City) then maybe the federal government and others - including Calgarians - would take more notice.
My question is
As the cities population booms and we keep building; at which point would we be adding a third treatment plan and expanding or adding the to the system?
Well turned my recycling bin into a rain barrel yesterday? Worked great and holds a ton of water for the yard. Anything to save the lawn and garden......
Thoughts?
I suppose what I don't understand is this:
Why not ask businesses to send employees who can, to work from home. I get it - some are opposed to the idea. It would clear out tens, if not 100k+ people from the city every day and push their water use back to the satellites like Airdrie where water isn't a concern, potentially saving critical supplies for Calgarians who need it.
Or is this another f you corporate profits come first type scenario?
I don’t think this would help because of satellites because many are on the same system, however it *would* cut down on need to shower (skipping showers is much easier when I wfh) and also toilet flushing (if it’s yellow let it mellow is not something you can do in a public bathroom).
From what I can gather, Okotoks and Cochrane are on their own systems while Airdrie and Chestermere use the city of Calgary.
So that's a combined total of 60k+ people. Obviously only some work in the city but it's a lot of water that's adds up fast.
They already did this. Too bad a lot of employers stupidly believe that if they can't see their staff, they're not working, so it will just be ignored... meanwhile in the office I can never find someone since they're either going for coffee or at a "meeting", back when everyone was working from home I'd call someone and get an immediate answer
Hypocritical?!? At a popular restaurant today, every patron automatically served XL glasses of water. Why not a bottled water requirement?? How necessary is it really that residents cut back water use?
Travelling to California and Hawaii in the past couple of years, restaurants don’t automatically bring water to everyone. You have to ask for it. This should be mandatory for restaurants here as well. What a waste!
Apparently Volker Stevin approached the city to fix the water feeder and quoted Calgary a maximum of 3 days to get the water flowing again. The city turned them down and wanted to use city workers.
I got this info from my neighbour whose cousin works for Volker Stevin. I think 3 days seemed too good to be true but I thought the whole story was interesting. I guess they contacted global and have an interview setup within the next couple days.
I doubt they could fix it in 3 days but it will be interesting if global runs the story.
I could see them meaning 3 days to fix the initial leak, as that's not too far out of the estimate the city gave at the start, but I suspect they didn't mean to fix the 5 other spots as well.
The city crew looked for other near-future problems with inspections while the pipe was clear, and then discovered 5 other areas that need repair. If Volker Stevin had been able to repair the pipe in 3 days, it seems very likely they wouldn't have included an inspection in that schedule -- maybe that would be fine, but maybe it could have led to it bursting as soon as it was pressurized.
Sometimes it makes sense to move slowly and thoughtfully to move quickly.
Another example is the injuries that occurred on-site. Were those caused by trying to be too quick about the work, rather than putting worker safety first? Hypothetically if so, they ended up hurting the speedy progress more than helping it.
I'm not saying city work crews are nailing it perfectly... certainly they're not. In a project like this with incredible pressure, risky work, and uncertain outcomes about what needs to be done, nobody can plan and execute a project perfectly. But I think it's pretty much impossible that any complex project can be done in 1/10th the time with the same quality.
Even if during that 3-ish day window if Volker Stevin they had added inspections and other fixes to their contract, it seems that 5 total repairs x 3 days each would still be faster than the current 1.5 weeks plus 3-5 more. Then again, Volker Stevin actually gets what priority work is. They’re a business and need to be profitable. Meanwhile the city takes its sweet time with unions and all. There’s no incentive to get it done fast or without more overruns than what is already necessary for an emergency. In any case, would be super fascinating if a Volker Stevin interview will actually come out. They’d have to be extremely careful with that to not jeopardize future contracts.
Unless Volker has a division where they do infrastructure, there is no way they are doing this repair, let alone in 3 days. 3 days is laughable with all the hoops that need to be jumped through to make sure the water is safe to drink.
Completely agree. I’m in disbelief as well. I’m just curious that they are confident enough to go to the news about it. Just curious to find out if a story does come out of it.
2 things:
1 I heard this is going to be a problem across all of Canada (aging infrastructure we haven't been maintaining because it's cheaper not to)
2 I heard some people in Calgary "don't believe" that there's water shortages because of this..... is that true?
Meter doesn't lie. Conspiracies about how and why this happened won't help anyone either. I for one want a real plan for stampede which could/should included shutting it down. We are teetering already on the brink, stampede will crush us.
I'm really glad the pipe ruptured in June instead of January.
Certainly, for the benefit of the crews working, water usage is naturally a lot lower in the winter than in the summer though. The system would be less strained in the winter.
Water volume in the reservoir is much lower in the winter too
water volume on your lawn is much higher in winter tho
r/fucklawns
Back when something similar happened in 2004, everyone flushed their toilet with snow. Seems reasonable to me
It's going to be interesting, the richest communities in Calgary are at the higher elevations. They'll be affected first. Them and anyone on the 4th floor of a 4 story high rise.
I'm not a waterologist but I would think proximity to the Glenmore treatment plant might also affect the pressure.
I was just looking at the size of pipes around the city. The ones downtown are pretty small, kinda like we’re end of line. I think the ones in the areas furthest from the plants would be impacted first as that’s where the pressure would go first. But no water specialist either.
How about a rebate on those that can show significant water use reductions? The price of water is pretty low on your bill, the fees are the bulk of costs. So, give us a rebate or credit if we've got a 40/50/60% drop in usage. It would be a heck of an incentive. Also when you get your water bill I doubt it will be much different from an unrestricted month.
Rebate lol. Expect infrastructure upgrade levy to be introduced in near future.
Yes since apparently our current taxes are not being used for infrastructure
Correct. They're being used for an arena
That and vacations for our politicians
Water services budget isn't on the city's ledger. They are a separate entity. They collect their own fee's/taxes along with waste and recycling, thats why it is a separate bill.
Sure, but taxpayer money is taxpayer money. The City could easily have used some of the arena money for critical infrastructure repairs.
It usually comes from the province.
Well atleast we have a good hockey team! Right?...
Used to change speed limit signs and lights to leds. What more would you like? Lol
I mean, to be fair the LED lights use only about 15% of the power and over a city, that adds up to a lot of savings
It's closer to 40% for commercial/industrial fixtures. For example, a 400w equivalent Metal Halide floodlight would use something like a 150w LED
still pretty bigly.
To add to that it last a lot longer so less money spent on replacing them over time.
>To add to that it last a lot longer so less money spent on replacing them over time. Except for those defective ones that keep turning purple 😄
I mean that's a big part of the problem, where our money goes...
We have rich politicians and lobbyists pockets to line afterall
It would be concerning if our property taxes were used for water services. It would be misuse of taxpayer dollars. Water and sewer services are paid for by user fees.
Water infrastructure is funded from utility bills.
No, they are being used for a climate emergency, arena deal we paid too much for, a green line that isn’t built. You’d think the city should use it for infrastructure upgrades in the city like aging water mains and aging community centres that are in bad shape :s
That would be too obvious
They'll claw back any rebates 10 fold by increasing rates in the coming years, just like the auto insurance industry did after the lockdowns lifted.
You can use 50% less water and only see a 5% drop in your water bill, since most of what you pay are administrative fees.
We're all trying. My showers are now 2 minutes long. Its incredibly inconvenient. I'm collecting rain water in shopping bins so my wife's flowers won't die. We should get some compensation. Service reduced = price reduction.
The City should use carrot/stick approach... If your water usage drops 25% (which was the goal the last time I checked) your billing operates as normal; if your usage does not drop 25% you pay a surcharge for every liter over the reduction goal BUT instead of the city pocketing that surcharge they redistribute it to those whose usage drops more than 25%. So the nut jobs who are having extra baths just to stick it to the city, thus increasing their water usage, would pay a surcharge proportional to their usage over the reduction goal while those who reduce their usage more than 25% would get credits on their bill (again proportional to their reduction)
Problem with this is the same incentives relativity for anything… Those who are already performing well have a lower chance of hitting target improvements because there’s less areas for large scale change. A household with resource conscious folks already observing best practises should not be penalized if they don’t hit a default target that is applied to heavy consumers. It’d be like charging people who don’t reduce their energy consumption. Some folks can just change some behaviour and reduce, others have been practically applying reduction principles all along.
This would be the rational approach to things. And this would involve someone at the city actually setting up a formula/algorithm for the bills to then be processed this way. They’d have to increase taxes to pull that off.
Reasonable, and measured! I would appreciate the nut jobs being fined.
I see everyone's bill possibly going up to pay for these repairs, nothing is going to come down. Period. This isn't going to be cheap. You can bet that other cities are now looking into their infrastructure and asking "can this happen to us?".
They already are. PCCPs are potentially a ticking time bomb across North America. There’s so much more if you google PCCP failure: https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-pccp-20170824-story.html
Rebate? The city? Raising taxes and then running surpluses into the hundreds of millions is how they roll.
Arenas won't pay for themselves
Water Services is not on the cities ledger. You pay user fee's for that, not taxes.
Remind me, who owns the utilities here?
A rebate for reduced use paid for by an increase for those that don't reduce, so that it's revenue neutral, might help a bit, but might also not be something that's easily accomplished administratively.
Government of Canada had a hard time setting this up for carbon tax , imagine the city trying to actually do this for water lol. They probably don’t even know how to save a document as a PDF.
I thought not having any water would be incentive enough lol.
Good point. No water at all would be terrible.
They could fine people based on this too. But they won't.
$30 use of water turns into a $130 bill. You can’t even reduce it to warrant a drop on the bill and while the rebate would be nice.. lol that would ever happen
When it was 5 to 7 days for restoration we simply decided to tough it out Now that is it 3 to 5 weeks, We have invested close to $400 in rain water capture in the last few days. Some rebate here would be nice. I have also started to record the water meter once per day to see how we are performing.
I saw 100 gallon stock tanks on sale at princess auto a while back and am kicking myself. My one rain barrel doesn't cut it, been filling everything I can find with rainwater
"I dunno, *property tax bill*, this city doesn't even have water..."
Utility bills should only have one line. Usage and rate.
On the contrary they’ll jack up the prices soon
a lot of people in the city dont pay for water, their landlord does.
Alternatively, if your water usage isn’t significantly reduced, you get a hefty fine. Equally as difficult to enforce but until money is involved, not everyone is going to care/do anything. I’m doing everything I can to conserve water but I just know somebody filled their pool/hot tub today
Or we could be thrilled to do our part in conservation and be honorable citizens. I would get behind 3X water fees applied during this event to residences whose water metres indicated they did NOT make an effort. Our house, verified by daily metre readings, used ~45L per day for 2 adults. I personally am not remotely interested in a rebate, consider it goodwill to your city. Else you have failed your city 😎 - Oliver Queen
I’m curious how two adults get down to 22.5 litres each. No showering, dishes, or laundry at all?
You can’t
All I can say is there's no way I use 350 litres of water a day as stated in the article. That number seems fucking egregious
I checked my water bill. My actual use is 4000L per month. That's 133L per day, without any active conservation. I don't use any outdoor water, which could be the difference. There are probably hoses and sprinklers that use more than me in a day.
133L is pretty reasonable I think. I checked a few days ago, and my family of 4 is around 500L/day (125L/person) on average through the year, also with no efforts made in conservation. We do have things like a HE washer, and upgraded toilets, so that helps to keep usage down. It’s bonkers to me to think that 350L/day is average. That’s got to include commercial/industrial usage, doesn’t it?! I would have to make a concerted effort to try to get through that much water on a daily basis.
Your family members are using 125L/day in the home... But don't forget to factor in work/school usage outside the home.
The commercial use that we don't even see is quite high. Watering plants and trees around the city. Restaurants cooking and cleaning.The delivery truck that needs to get washed / maintained as part of regular service to drop off goods at the grocery store. The grocery store needing to keep fruits and vegetables moist.
I thought I read 231L/person/day, but regardless, still more than enough. The WHO suggested 150L/person/day allows people to live very comfortably. When camping (backcountry backpacking) we realize only 5L are needed a day and are enough for drinking, food prep, washing. Makes me wish there were a way for the city to only allow a certain amount of water (say 50-100L/person/day) run into each residence. Those who get it will know how to best ration it and nit have an issues. The people filling hot tubs and such now will start complaining by 6am when their daily ration is used up. Heck, today I even went for a 10-minute drive as the rain was coming down hard because I figured that will be my car was this month. This week I’ll just wipe the windshield down with some Windex.
How do you check that? On Enmax bill it shows meter cube for water treatment and supply. 1 m3 = 1000 L?
Yup, m3 = 1000L. They also have a little graph showing you usage over the last 12 months, which you can use to estimate your average usage (within a a reasonable margin of error; if you want to get precise, you’d have to check each individual bill from the last 12 months.)
It shows around 8-14k L per month recently. Doesn’t make sense. It’s just 2 adults and we usually take short showers and skip taking shower many times when at home. Laundry hardly once per week. Dishwasher also not much use. Water the garden a bit (before restrictions), didn’t water the lawn even once this year yet. Are we missing something or do we need to check something that may be causing this much water use? The only thing that’s coming to my mind is toilet flushes being inefficient… but so much difference? Moved here around 2.5 yrs ago. Not sure how old they are and I was planning on replacing them anyways. Quick google search shows standard toilets use 7 gallons, and design improvements have reduced that to 1.3-1.6 gallons.
If you pull off the lid to your toilet and look inside the tank, there might be a stamp indicating the volume of water used per flush.
Thanks. It looks like they quite efficient. 1.28 GPF.
I just checked my bill and it says that I used 14 m3 last month. How in the actual Fuck did I use 14,000 litres!? Thst dosnt seem right at all or my math is way off
Same here. It shows around 8-14k L per month recently. Doesn’t make sense. It’s just 2 adults and we usually take short showers and skip taking shower many times when at home. Laundry hardly once per week. Dishwasher also not much use. Water the garden a bit (before restrictions), didn’t water the lawn even once this year yet. Are we missing something or do we need to check something that may be causing this much water use? The only thing that’s coming to my mind is toilet flushes being inefficient… but so much difference? Moved here around 2.5 yrs ago. Not sure how old they are and I was planning on replacing them anyways. Quick google search shows standard toilets use 7 gallons, and design improvements have reduced that to 1.3-1.6 gallons.
You yourself can read your water meter. Maybe there is a leak somewhere. Maybe next time you're home alone, turn off anything that uses water, and then read the meter. See if its moving. Your plumbing should have shutoff valves to isolate particular lines.
Thanks. I’ll check that out. Don’t see any visible leaks, but this is a nice way to verify.
I did have a leaking toilet, but I e since repaired it with all new parts Could be thet my shower head and toilets aren't the most efficient but 14k litres completly shocked me
I think that’s just what they put. I have the same thing for pretty much every month except February. I apparently only used 2000L of water.
The month before I only used 3000L. Look for the headings “Reading”, “Read Type”, and “Use”. My read type is “Actual” and the math works out (the reading increases by the use).
It’s an average based on population divided by total usage. So includes commercial and industrial use within the total divided by our population. It also includes ‘losses’ whether unaccounted for (leaks) or accounted for (evaporation). The real average number per person without those factors is in many reports different organizations or jurisdictions have published as being perhaps 170 Lpd to 230 Lpd.
I was thinking the same. Living alone, even before this I would only run my dishwasher once a week when it’s completely full, and not have a shower every single day. Now I’ve adjusted to sponge baths, which work just fine, and a couple of toilet flushes only per day. Dishes are wiped off with a damp cloth. I don’t need to make super messy pasta sauce and stuff like that right now. But unfortunately there are way too many entitled people in this city that aren’t even willing to make small adjustments that one really shouldn’t need to discuss. It’s a sad state of society we’re in. Maybe if people had all water and power turned off for a year some of these people would have a better appreciation for things.
50 litres for a load of laundry in a front load machine, 170 litres in a top load machine. 11 litres of water for a load of dishes in a machine. Plus the toilet, water used in cooking, coffee & tea, do you eat fast food? the water from your pop is included in this. Showering, a 10 minute shower is almost 250 litres of water.
Where did you get those figures? A 10 minute continuous shower consumes 94.64 liters of water. [https://www.omnicalculator.com/everyday-life/bath-vs-shower-footprint](https://www.omnicalculator.com/everyday-life/bath-vs-shower-footprint)
Who does all of those things every, single, day?! I normally only do a couple loads of laundry a MONTH. Dishes like twice a week. I shower every 2 days.
They might be basing this info off a family of four. I know for a fact I can get away with only doing 2 laundry washes a month and only use the dish washer once a week on a regular. These water restrictions honestly haven’t been that intrusive for me. The only difference I’ve had to make is stopping doing a shower every day and the at- home car wash.
They must be. Any single person using this high of water is insanity, even granting a daily shower. But another set of sheets and wear your clothes more than once ffs 🤦🏼♀️
The only one of those things I don’t typically do each day is laundry.
You likely do not have multiple children. Dish washer pre water shortage in our house was almost always twice a day.
Just checked our bill. My family is about 600L a day. fuck....
Maybe not in your home, but you still eat out, use washrooms outside of your home, wash your car, buy local products that require water to either manufacture or clean etc.
I think it’s wrong too but to do some quick math: 9-11 L per flush at about 10-20 flushes per day. On the high end of 11L per flush for 20 flushes that’s 220L based on toileting alone. I think 350 is still high but it seems like flushing after every use is the biggest personal use of filtered water consumption.
Who's flushing 10-20 times per day?!
Look buddy, I had taco bell yesterday. I'm in pain!
Mine uses less than 4L, and it’s nothing special
Modern toilets use half the amount you're calculating at the low end.
I googled average number of flushes and sources say 5. Personally I think that’s low, but let’s say it’s 10 for ease of calculations. Old toilets use up to 11L. New higher efficiency and dual flush toilets as low as 3.5L. So even with old toilets, if a person living alone flushes once in the morning and once at night for the time being, that should at least limit toilet use to max 20L/day. Put some bricks or a bottle filled with water into the toilet tank and it’ll act as displacement to further reduce water. Then, to wash one’s hands, we don’t need to turn a tap on full. You can soap and wash hands under a much lower flow.
One thing I don't understand is this... The plant still works, it's just a transport issue at this point. Can we not start using tanker trucks (potable trucks) to help transport water from the Bearspaw plant to the remote reservoirs to help stabilize the system? It won't be much, be at this point doesn't every bit help?
There are no facilities setup to load or unload the trucks at meaningful scale. Unloading the truck increases the risk of contamination of the storage reservoirs. To off set the increase in water use over the past few days 70 trucks a day would be needed. To get back to normal it would be over 10 times that. Setting up stations when people could pickup water would be a lot easier, but a major logistics challenge. I'd wait 45 minutes to fill a few jugs but I'm not sure many would unless there was a dire need.
Yeah, and if you have to drive to pick them up, that's another barrier. I don't have a car and there's only so much water I can haul home on the bus or by foot.
Not enough to really make a difference. A good rule of thumb for logistics is that the hierarchy is: Pipeline > Shipping > Rail > Trucks. The typical water truck you might see out and about has a capacity between about 5 000L and 20 000L. Currently Glenmore is supplying about 480 000 000L/day. Just to move it from 480M L/day to 481M L/day would take about 5 000 trips of the larger water trucks, and not change much of the circumstance. Bumping supply up 5% would look more like 24 000 trips per day, assuming you could find enough of the larger sized trucks, and several times that for smaller trucks. At that point loading and unloading, and traffic control all start to be problems that themselves could take weeks to untangle. Trucking it around can keep a population at "not dying of dehydration" levels, but it's not going to meaningfully supplement what Glenmore is providing.
50 million litres of water extra was used in one day. Water truck can hold 5000-10000 litres. That would be like 5000 trucks a day.
Standard bathtub holds 302L. Grab a 3L bottle. Fill up that tub after filling your bottle in the sink. That's how many trips it takes for that 10,000L truck to do a million litres. Now walk to the other end of your community and have it filled at your friend's place. 20min there, 20 min back. This is what you are suggesting to do for those reservoirs, times dozens of trucks.
I did a field trip to the Bearspaw treatment plant. As I recall they have 3 pumps that they cycle through to pump water into this main feeder (so they can be maintained without interrupting supply). The scale of one of these pumps is about the size of a 2 story house. No truck is going to replace that....
I saw the math for that somewhere yesterday. To transport even 25% would require 20,000 trucks per day. Imagine the complaining of roads clogged up with water trucks non-stop. People don’t realize how much water actually gets used in the city each day.
I find it fascinating that such an idea is not obviously nonfeasible to people. It's not that simple.
Math is hard.
Agreed. Residents doing their part is a must, but trucking at least SOME of the water from the plant to the reservoirs seems like it could only help, not hurt.
No, it could definitely hurt. If you contaminate a reservoir, guess what? The entire reservoir gets flushed. It could easily make the situation far, far worse.
I left my comment very early in this thread. Since then, many more commenters have made the infeasibility of trucking the water (in any capacity) evident to me. I stand corrected.
Temporary above ground pipelines? Calgary is full of midstream companies. Use for water for now. Don’t know how long something like that would take to set up.
Too long.
Way too long. Just worked on a project where this was done for less than 500m. You need specific angles in the pipes for water flow, otherwise you need pumping station. Then, where do you run the pipe? Can’t imagine that most would be happy with it being put through the middle of their back yard. You’d be looking at a project many, many times longer in duration.
Oddly, pipelines generally need to be buried for structural reasons. They can support their own dry weight, but water is very heavy, and they are circles. Burying them makes it so the circle doesn't support the water, the ground supports it. We could run some slightly large pipelines above ground, but the break was in a 76" pipe you could drive a truck through. Moving that kind of water takes engineering.
I read this is affecting 11km of pipeline
It’s not about getting water they have plenty coming in from the river… the problem is the glenmore is at its maximum capacity with how much water it can supply. This risks things going downhill for glenmore aswell.
Which is why they are proposing treating water at Bearspaw treatment plant and transporting it in trucks....
Ahh yeah must have misinterpreted that, would definitely help they have to figure something out here quick.
This is my worry. How much longer can Glenmore keep up with the diversion. If something compromises Glenmore we are beyond f’d.
Cancel the arena. Looks like we have bigger fish to fry.
This is what I was telling my wife. I pay my taxes and expect at minimum working essentials. Not my issue If the city isn’t prepared for a water break because they spent money on an arena instead.
*"We would have to find* ***some other solution***. I know there's contingency plans. ***I haven't heard what they are***..." As if the mayor isn't aware that other cities have implemented hard limits and fines for non-compliance. "Mandatory indoor water restrictions" means metre readings & fines. If you have a smart metre, *they know* what your household water usage is. They could just say cut back to 300L per day total, per house, or you get an automatic fine mailed to you like a red light camera ticket. Limiters and secondary/outdoor water shutoffs for repeat offenders are also plausible, according to news articles about what's already happened in places like Utah, Guelph, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.
I do wonder how this works for large apartment buildings. I don’t pay my own water, it’s included in rent. I don’t think we have individual meters. Would the building itself be fined if water use isn’t properly reduced?
I think it could technically be done on a per building basis. The City knows how many people officially live in each unit and can base it on that.
Per household isnt a reasonable expectation. 5 people and 2 dogs live in my home. I dont mind using less water to account for my dog. But if my house has 5 people, and my neighbor has 2, and we both have equal sized houses, then they should be using census data to determine usage.
And my house is a rental, it contains four ‘households’ living under the same roof in four different rentals. They would have to have some way to avoid punishing one for their neighbour’s excessive use. Or fine the landlord, but that’s not super fair either.
Sometimes an imperfect solution is better than none.
Sure as long as there is an appropriate appeals process in place. Which would overwhelm our courts To the people downvoting me, do you believe some households should be facing multithousand dollar fines simply because they have more people living in the home? Would it be fair to fine people for not having a certain number of people living in a home because we are in a housing crisis in canada?
The same folks downvoting you are the same folks that want density density density. Basement suite, garage suite etc all use the same meter. The solution is vote in a competent council who focuses on actual civic governance
Most of the information that I was hoping would be available from the City including details of the pipe, and a highres map of the water system is in this article.
You do know those things came from the City right? The CBC did a good job of pulling the info together for this article.
Yes, I am aware of the source. I am referring to how I hoped the City would be the one providing these as part of its communication "strategy". It's like when the Peace Bridge was being built, and there was so much disinformation circulating. It turns out there was a simple document available at the City that outlined the (very practical) reasons and justification for building it, but somehow they never bothered to find a way to communicate it to the public.
What on Earth do you mean? You just said they are the ones who made the document available
Sorry I thought it was clear. The City has been doing a poor job communicating during this crisis, though this seems to be standard operating procedure based on historical examples. It shouldn't take journalists to uncover information that should be readily available to the public from day 1.
They can’t communicate it as effectively because they can’t post news on social media.
A lot of this info has been provided directly by the city during the daily livestream updates.
Most of the people here didn't read the article, and the city is not helping with its messaging for not explaining the problem like a five year old can understand. Glenmore Treatment plant can't maintain the water pressure. If everyone in Calgary turned on all their taps at once, the highest and furthest communities will not get water at all. This is the threat. Water trucks and all these other bonehead comments wont help one bit. Also, Water Services is not part of the City of Calgary's budget, so stop with the stupid cancel arena comments. I have no skin in that game, but the department does not share a budget with the City.
Yeah, this thread and the water crisis in general is really highlighting that for every enlightened, reasonable person out there, there's an ignorant yang that's dumber than a bag of hammers, and more inclined to post.
I was at an event today with some folks in the construction/civil engineering sector and from what I heard, there’s been quite a few local firms who have contacted the city offering up their assistance/manpower and the city will not even return their calls…
If the city already has as much manpower as is helpful, more won’t make it go any faster. As somebody nicely put it today ‘9 women can’t have a baby in one month’. More people on the job isn’t always more useful.
It’s not ‘manpower’ in the labour sense that they’re offering up, it’s the expertise and leverage in sourcing materials
I'm a project manager. I can help
Everybody get naked and go outside - that's your shower for the week! (it's raining here pretty good right now)
Well.... sounds like they better giddy up!!! We know stampede is coming!
Someone really didn’t do their jobs if there is so many sections unstable and broken. These pipes should be maintained regularly.
Wait…they said we’re all in this together? Right?
Oh spicy, is that allowed now? Why aren't you downvoted to oblivion
We’re all in this together, so let’s just be more vigilante about our water use. Simple things like turning your taps off when brushing your teeth, cooking, washing the dishes and etc. Other things like lowering your water levels in your toilet, reusing bath water for your plants and etc can go long way. The more creative we get, the more efficient we can be. Throw in businesses reducing their consumption as well and we’re gonna be just fine.
"Simple things like turning your taps off when brushing your teeth, cooking, washing the dishes and etc." Who leaves the tap on while brushing their teeth, cooking or washing dishes?! What's the point of doing that, just to deliberately waste water? I don't get this.
I argued with a friend about this the other day. She's from Edmonton and said she was glad she could still run the water while she brushed her teeth and it infuriated me a bit. She said she spits and wants it to get washed down right away, I said turn the tap on and off when you spit. There was no getting through to her though.
I know someone who does that as well and it makes my blood boil. Just seems so wasteful in general. Like, is it too much effort to turn it off and then on again to rinse your toothbrush?
Lots of people. You see it in movies, see it from others. I don’t think it’s even on purpose, it’s probably just out of habit and it just doesn’t register in their mind that water is being wasted.
I guess it's an abundance of endless resources mentality, which would be a wonderfully comforting way to live if one wants to be blissfully ignorant. These people never learned the 'tragedy of the commons' lesson in school, and based things I've heard in some right-wing churches there's possibly also a "take it, you've earned it" mentality from uneducated and self-centered false religious teachings.
There are people who don’t turn the water off while brushing their teeth? I’m 34 and learned that when I was 3.
Sadly yes. The city needs to come out with some kind of presser giving people tips on how to be less wasteful. Some people just might not know unless they’re told there’s a better way.
Are we gonna be Stampede-fine?
Not taking baths and limiting laundry are two big ones. Filling a tub one third of the way uses approximately 75 litres of water. Top load washers use 110 - 135 litres.
Why hasn’t the prime minister commented on one of his major cities running out of water?
Because calgary isn't going to help him win an election
Our mayor and City council haven't exactly been communicating how much of a crisis this truly is. National headlines all week have said Calgarians are asked to take 3 minute showers and only do full loads of laundry. Big deal. If the headlines say Calgary is using 95 to 99% of available water supply (based on sustainable threshold of 485 million litres provided by the City) then maybe the federal government and others - including Calgarians - would take more notice.
Because we’re in the west. Why would he care about Calgary?
>Because we’re in the west. Why would he care about Calgary? Are we the unloved red-haired middle child who acts out for attention?
A lot of people might decide to go back to Terontewww.
Lucky it’s not 38 and smoky like most years lately
My question is As the cities population booms and we keep building; at which point would we be adding a third treatment plan and expanding or adding the to the system?
Well turned my recycling bin into a rain barrel yesterday? Worked great and holds a ton of water for the yard. Anything to save the lawn and garden...... Thoughts?
It's a great idea. I wonder if there's a way to daisy chain all the bins together to catch 3 times as much water.
I suppose what I don't understand is this: Why not ask businesses to send employees who can, to work from home. I get it - some are opposed to the idea. It would clear out tens, if not 100k+ people from the city every day and push their water use back to the satellites like Airdrie where water isn't a concern, potentially saving critical supplies for Calgarians who need it. Or is this another f you corporate profits come first type scenario?
I don’t think this would help because of satellites because many are on the same system, however it *would* cut down on need to shower (skipping showers is much easier when I wfh) and also toilet flushing (if it’s yellow let it mellow is not something you can do in a public bathroom).
Tim Hortons customers don’t seem to agree with you. They let everything mellow.
From what I can gather, Okotoks and Cochrane are on their own systems while Airdrie and Chestermere use the city of Calgary. So that's a combined total of 60k+ people. Obviously only some work in the city but it's a lot of water that's adds up fast.
Calgary supplies a lot of satellites with water.
They already did this. Too bad a lot of employers stupidly believe that if they can't see their staff, they're not working, so it will just be ignored... meanwhile in the office I can never find someone since they're either going for coffee or at a "meeting", back when everyone was working from home I'd call someone and get an immediate answer
Hypocritical?!? At a popular restaurant today, every patron automatically served XL glasses of water. Why not a bottled water requirement?? How necessary is it really that residents cut back water use?
Travelling to California and Hawaii in the past couple of years, restaurants don’t automatically bring water to everyone. You have to ask for it. This should be mandatory for restaurants here as well. What a waste!
Apparently Volker Stevin approached the city to fix the water feeder and quoted Calgary a maximum of 3 days to get the water flowing again. The city turned them down and wanted to use city workers. I got this info from my neighbour whose cousin works for Volker Stevin. I think 3 days seemed too good to be true but I thought the whole story was interesting. I guess they contacted global and have an interview setup within the next couple days. I doubt they could fix it in 3 days but it will be interesting if global runs the story.
I could see them meaning 3 days to fix the initial leak, as that's not too far out of the estimate the city gave at the start, but I suspect they didn't mean to fix the 5 other spots as well.
That would only be 15 days according to their estimates. Which is a lot better still
That’s not necessarily how it works, it doesn’t scale linearly like that.
Why wouldn't it if you have separate crews on each segment?
The city crew looked for other near-future problems with inspections while the pipe was clear, and then discovered 5 other areas that need repair. If Volker Stevin had been able to repair the pipe in 3 days, it seems very likely they wouldn't have included an inspection in that schedule -- maybe that would be fine, but maybe it could have led to it bursting as soon as it was pressurized. Sometimes it makes sense to move slowly and thoughtfully to move quickly. Another example is the injuries that occurred on-site. Were those caused by trying to be too quick about the work, rather than putting worker safety first? Hypothetically if so, they ended up hurting the speedy progress more than helping it. I'm not saying city work crews are nailing it perfectly... certainly they're not. In a project like this with incredible pressure, risky work, and uncertain outcomes about what needs to be done, nobody can plan and execute a project perfectly. But I think it's pretty much impossible that any complex project can be done in 1/10th the time with the same quality.
Even if during that 3-ish day window if Volker Stevin they had added inspections and other fixes to their contract, it seems that 5 total repairs x 3 days each would still be faster than the current 1.5 weeks plus 3-5 more. Then again, Volker Stevin actually gets what priority work is. They’re a business and need to be profitable. Meanwhile the city takes its sweet time with unions and all. There’s no incentive to get it done fast or without more overruns than what is already necessary for an emergency. In any case, would be super fascinating if a Volker Stevin interview will actually come out. They’d have to be extremely careful with that to not jeopardize future contracts.
Your neighbor whose cousin supposedly works for them... Right. Be sure to let us know when that interview airs. Volker Stevin paves roads.
That’s one of their key things. They also lay pipes, tunneling work, and deal with other infrastructure.
I have no horse in this race. I thought I would just share. I’m in disbelief as well. Reddit gonna Reddit though.
Unless Volker has a division where they do infrastructure, there is no way they are doing this repair, let alone in 3 days. 3 days is laughable with all the hoops that need to be jumped through to make sure the water is safe to drink.
Volker has a entire underground infrastructure division
Completely agree. I’m in disbelief as well. I’m just curious that they are confident enough to go to the news about it. Just curious to find out if a story does come out of it.
2 things: 1 I heard this is going to be a problem across all of Canada (aging infrastructure we haven't been maintaining because it's cheaper not to) 2 I heard some people in Calgary "don't believe" that there's water shortages because of this..... is that true?
People don’t believe a lot of things; doesn’t make it true.
Are you telling me when the pipe was installed it came with a 100year warranty?
[удалено]
How is there not a contingency plan or secondary reduced pipeline that can be used until there is a fix?
Our “distribution fees” are going to be even higher after all these repairs..
I say they do water reads every week. Keep everyone honest.
Yep but please be sure to report your neighbors if they aren’t doing as they’re told. Sounds familiar 🤔
Meter doesn't lie. Conspiracies about how and why this happened won't help anyone either. I for one want a real plan for stampede which could/should included shutting it down. We are teetering already on the brink, stampede will crush us.