Former Calgary city councillors who served over the last 20 years said they were unaware of the criticality of the Bearspaw feeder main, but understood deferred infrastructure maintenance could cause issues in the future.
It comes after the release of findings by an independent panel tasked with reviewing the circumstances that eventually led to a catastrophic failure of the Bearspaw feeder main in 2024, a pipe that carries 60 per cent of Calgary’s drinking water.
According to the report, the feeder main was designated for inspection in 2017, 2020, and 2022, but those inspections were redirected or delayed.
This, despite risks of a failure on the Bearspaw feeder main being identified after a similar rupture on the same type of pipe in northeast Calgary in 2004.
The report found systemic gaps deep-rooted over two decades in how Calgary’s water infrastructure is planned, managed and overseen.
“As a result of that management structure, that information and that clarity of the implications was not well understood all the way up the decision tree within the city,” Siegfried Kiefer, who chaired the independent panel, told reporters Wednesday.
“Nor was it understood by the various councils and the mayors that have been in place over that period of time.”
The Bearspaw feeder main ruptured in June 2024, which plunged the city into months of water restrictions as nearly two dozen repairs were made along the pipe in the months following the break. The water line burst again on Dec. 30, and is currently undergoing repairs.
Ward 10 Coun. Andre Chabot, who served on council from 2005 to 2017 before returning to the role in 2021, said those previous councils didn’t know how “vulnerable” the feeder main was.
He said he isn’t sure where the flow of information to city council “stopped” on the critical water line.
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“That’s pretty much what council was doing, dealing with things based on the information that they had,” Chabot said.
“You can’t do stuff about things you don’t know anything about and that’s part of the challenge with what happened here.”
Druh Farrell, who represented Ward 7 from 2001 to 2021, said that while councillors were unaware of issues with water infrastructure, there were warnings that continued deferral of maintenance could “bite you” in the future.
“What I do remember, when I first got elected, is members of administration would talk about the critical need for deep utilities,” Farrell told Global News.
“They’re easy to forget about because they’re invisible, but if they fail, they fail big.”
Farrell also pointed to “tremendous pressure” council was under during her time in office to manage city growth and sprawl.
“There was always some tension between new growth and taking care of what we had,” Farrell said. “Often the decision was to focus on that new growth.”
The report found that the city’s rapid expansion impacted capacity, as well as costs of the water utility.
“It has been the fastest-growing major city in Canada, expanding by more than approximately 70 per cent since 2000,” the report reads.
“In addition, it remains a low-density municipality, resulting in more kilometres of pipe per resident than any other large Canadian peer city. These factors have stretched capacity and added maintenance and asset integrity costs for the water utility.”
Gian-Carlo Carra, the councillor for Ward 9 between 2010 and 2025, said he believes there could be more infrastructure issues due to past council’s decisions as well as cost-cutting measures during the economic downturn.
“Everything is going to be a crisis because of the kind of city we have,” he said. “The fiscal hawks on council said we have to save money, let’s take a significant cut to our road maintenance budget. What happens eight, nine years later? All of a sudden the roads are in terrible shape.”
Chabot also noted cost-cutting measures, especially during the pandemic, but said if council knew how imminent the issue was with the feeder main, “it would’ve been made a priority.”
“They took the attitude of, ‘Well, it’s not broken, so let’s worry about the things that are broken and fix those first,’” he said.
The provincial government said it is monitoring the situation in Calgary, while directing blame on former mayor and current Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi for the city’s current water woes.
“Calgarians and all Albertans deserve leadership that safeguards essential services with planning and accountability,” Chestermere-Strathmore United Conservative Party MLA Chantelle de Jonge said in a statement. “If Nenshi couldn’t manage the city’s water system, how can anyone trust him to manage an entire province?”
In a statement released Friday, Nenshi said the independent panel report cleared him and other politicians of responsibility.
“This isn’t about throwing anyone under the bus, nor should it be,” he said. “It’s about ensuring that not only does this get fixed, but that the conditions leading to this never happen again.”
Calgary city council voted unanimously to have administration develop a plan to advance all the recommendations made by the panel in its report, including an overhaul to risk management and asset integrity processes, as well as the creation of a dedicated water utility department.
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