As a former engineer for a public utility, Edmontonian Nick Khotenko had a special interest in Calgary’s latest Bearspaw feeder main break.

So much so that Khotenko dove into Calgary’s open data catalogue to start charting the city’s more than 5,400 kilometres of water mains.

He collected, sorted, and overlaid them onto a City of Calgary map via Google based on their year, material, diameter, capacity and the capacity/age ratio. Being a relatively young city, the vast majority of Calgary pipes are made from PVC and are in the 0 to 30-year-old range.

Khotenko, who spent 12 years working for a public utility, said he’d seen a lot of problems similar to this in the past, and it’s dealing with infrastructure you can’t really see with your eyes, like roads, transit, or other city functions.

“I think that’s a hopefully useful tool for, really, the owners of these assets, which is the public, to understand that they own this multi-billion dollar asset that has evolved, changed, and it’s really kind of a complex system, and this kind of tool is hopefully useful to better understand it at a glance,” he told LWC.

The graph shows different pipe materials by colour, and there’s a distinctive bullseye image created as you move further out from the centre of the city into the suburbs. That’s part of the evolution. There are cast iron pipes in the inner city, ductile irons, steel and others, then concrete and now PVC in the suburban areas.

“The technologies change. Research comes along and says, ‘Oh, this pipe is better.’ But one of the problems, of course, is the designers are always looking to save the cost, they’re always trying to make the best decision,” he said.

“And with the information they have, they say, ‘oh, yeah, this new pipe that’s great for what we need,’ and they adopt it and use it. But the true test is decades of service, right? So right now, the latest and greatest is what’s in the suburbs and what’s being built.”

Repairing Calgary’s precast concrete Bearspaw feeder main

Michael Thompson, General Manager of Infrastructure Services with the City of Calgary, told the media on Monday that repairs to the Bearspaw feeder main are coming along.

The ruptured piece was cut and excised and then transported to a location where it could be inspected further.

On Khotenko’s map, you can clearly see that the feeder main line along 16 Avenue NW is a 77-inch concrete pipe from 1975. That’s the precast type of the vintage that’s given the City of Calgary problems.

Thompson said that after they repaired the initial break back in 2024, plus the five hotspots, they went about looking at data on the rest of the pipe. That’s when they identified 23 additional locations for repairs.

“While we worked on a permanent replacement pipe, we installed a fiber optic monitoring system to provide continuous real-time monitoring of wire breaks and their exact locations along the pipe,” Thompson said.  

“We always knew and communicated that the pipe was operating with wire breaks, and we were monitoring it, prepared to make additional repairs if we started to see the condition of the pipe change.”

In 2025, Thompson said they’d heard 18 total wire breaks. No wire breaks were recorded in the two months leading up to the Dec. 30, 2025, break, he said.

“As we experienced on December 30, monitoring for wire breaks does not predict every failure for this pipe, and we need to change how we’re monitoring and operating this pipe going forward,” Thompson said.

There is no current alternative to moving the volume of water from the Bearspaw water treatment plant, Thompson said. As Khotenko’s analysis shows, while the concrete pipes are among the lowest number of kilometres, they have the highest estimated volume of water travelling through them due to their diameter.

“Knowing this, we need to proceed with increased caution as we use this pipe,” Thompson said.

“We had previously identified a number of locations that we were monitoring along the pipe, and we need to move forward with urgent reinforcement work to support the stability of the pipe. This work will likely include reinforcing segments of the pipe using the concrete encasement method we used in 2024.”

He said these reinforcements would take place as soon as possible, but no later than this spring. Even then, they may have to operate the line at a reduced capacity.

Thompson also said that barring setbacks, they hope to have the latest break repaired by next week. Meanwhile, there’s an urgent need for Calgarians to conserve water, he said.

Also, once the pipe is repaired, Thompson said there’s no guarantee that another break won’t happen.

No solutions, just trade-offs: Khotenko

Khotenko said cities have limited resources to attend to infrastructure challenges. They make decisions based on the data they have, similar to what he’s presented visually.

“I think it’s an important question: Do you look at really large main pipelines that are old and aging, that are considered a high risk, and only spend money there, or do you invest in maintenance programs?” Khotenko said.

“So, those are decisions that are being made every day.”

The key, however, is in bringing the public along with this kind of information so they can understand why money is being spent on a project, or why a road has to be closed to allow for repairs. That’s why he was interested in digging into Calgary’s robust open data catalogue to give Calgarians a visual representation of the pipes in their neighbourhoods.

“It’s a very long-term process, too. These decisions that are made in the short term will impact future generations for decades, basically.”

Calgary Mayor Jeromy Farkas said that’s the goal with the upcoming replacement of the Bearspaw feeder main.

“The situation is deeply frustrating, and this is a council that acknowledges responsibility,” he said.  

“The buck stops with me as mayor and with us as a city council, and none of us support just passing this issue on to future generations, we will solve this once and for all.”

The City of Calgary has approved $1.1 billion in water infrastructure work beginning in 2026.