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Listening to the daily updates from the city pertaining to the main feeder water pipe incident, a question was asked about making a backup plan. The response from the city planner was, “they were looking at this but it takes years of study to plan this out.” Why? It seems fairly obvious that they could twin the existing pipeline with a metal pipe designed to handle half the volume of water, but able to handle more if needed. The fact is the existing concrete pipe is more than 50 years old. It broke once, it will break again. A steel pipe is much stronger and will last a lot longer and could be half the size to handle the same volume of water. They have over a billion dollars in the reserve fund that could be used to pay for it. A backup plan always makes sense, even the city hall tall foreheads must agree about this? It’s just good fortune that this catastrophic failure happened when the weather was relatively nice. Imagine if this happened in the middle of the winter with a ton of snow and -25C temperatures? Forewarned is forearmed and this exercise in disaster is a wake-up call.
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JOHN HANCOCK
(Hopefully we eventually get a full picture of why this happened.)
Don’t believe it
I’m not sure we are to give any credibility to anything emanating from Mayor Gondek and the rest of her complicit crew regarding the current water shortage situation. Shortly after the catastrophic failure of the Bowness feeder main, a current U of C professor informed the media the type of concrete feeder main that failed only has a lifespan of 50 years. So it seems more than coincidental that shortly that statement was made, Gondek, ostensibly in an effort to reassure Calgarians the remainder of our water supply infrastructure remains structurally sound, informs anyone who will listen that those feeder mains actually have a lifespan of 100 years. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact the failed feeder main in Bowness would be 50 years old next year, and so perhaps many Calgarians were in fact beginning to wonder what the city is doing to replace similar aging feeder mains. Waiting for more catastrophic failures? But wait, says Gondek, don’t panic, those feeder mains are good for another 50 years, so that’s why we don’t have a proactive replacement program in place at the present time. And the money that would normally be spent on that kind of proactive undertaking can now be spent on more important things so dear to Calgarians, like bike lanes, more high-density housing and Blue Sky City branding.
BOB GRUNDIE
(Certainly it appears something is not adding up here.)
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