Risks to Calgary’s drinking water transmission and treatment could remain high until 2035, when billions in water infrastructure upgrades are complete, according to a new city asset management report.

The water utility asset management update, presented at the Oct. 14 Infrastructure and Planning Committee meeting, fulfilled recommendation four of the Bearspaw South feeder main independent review panel’s closeout letter.

In that June 30, 2026, closeout letter recommendation, it stated that “the absence of current, actionable Asset Management Plans was one of the most direct causes of the BPSFM (Bearspaw South Feeder Main) failure.”

It asked for a progress update to council within 90 days.

Thus far, by class, 6 of 7 asset management plans for drinking water are issued and being implemented, with only 2 of 7 in wastewater, and 3 of 5 in stormwater.  Currently, the outstanding one for drinking water is for the Glenmore Reservoir.

It’s expected the remaining plans will be completed by spring 2027.

The findings to date show that there are several plant and transmission risks that will remain high until assessment, mitigation, and redundancy are complete.

Near-term funding was deemed adequate, and the pace of mitigation was limited by the ability to take infrastructure offline for assessment or renewal.

For wastewater, “several extensive and high risks will remain for an extended period.” The risk understanding is based on the age, material, and consequence estimates that will improve with ongoing assessment.

Proactive work is underway on highest consequence pipes, the city admin cover report read, and the pace of mitigations is limited by capacity.

Ryan Vanderputten, director of capital planning and business services with the City of Calgary, said that aside from the Bearspaw South feeder main, there are other potential single points of failure that are high consequence of failure, but low likelihood.

“In the past, we’ve accepted that there are low likelihoods. We’ve focused on other things,” he told committee members.

“We’re now making sure that we’ve got, whether it’s redundancy, whether it’s mitigation plans, or whether it’s an emergency response plan, we’re making sure all those are in place for that consequence because we’ve seen the impact that it has on our community.”

Constant ‘state of crisis’: Coun. Wyness

Last week, Calgary’s Executive Committee voted to approve a potential massive water rate hike to help fund $6.5 billion in water infrastructure upgrades.

Ward 2 Coun. Jennifer Wyness said that city admin has been “traumatized” by the Bearspaw South feeder main failures and has changed how the water utility analyzes risk.

“They’ve changed their risk registry, and are now keeping us in this, like, state of crisis,” she said.

“I’m sorry, but there are other water utilities that continue to have pipe failures, but are taking a more measured, calm approach to solving the crisis. And we, for some reason, are escalating the reaction rather than solving the problem in a calm manner.”

Wyness said that the city has to pace itself. She said it would be hard to find a water system in North America that’s not experiencing water pipe failures, and it’s important to create a system that responds to it and proactively replaces it.

“(City admin) are more responding to public pressure and not helping educate how we can successfully solve this problem because Calgarians do not have unlimited funds to give us to solve this problem,” she said.

Ward 10 Coun. Andre Chabot said that city council has changed its risk tolerance, not city admin.

“Going from a run-to-failure methodology to a try-to-prevent-any-failure methodology is hard to make that transition from one methodology to another,” he said.  

“Administration is trying to deliver on what council asks, which is to prevent any future failures. Which, in a system that has a lot of challenges with it in regards to how it developed over time, it’s going to be very difficult to try and make everything work and prevent any failures from occurring.”

Ward 6 Coun. John Pantazopoulos said that after voting to approve the big water rate increase, he took comfort in knowing that the system would be fixed. He was concerned, however, that nearly half of the asset management plans still aren’t fully developed.

“When the majority of our sewer system doesn’t have an asset plan designed, some haven’t been inspected, those things are quite concerning,” he said.

“The questions that I’m going to be raising is just saying, like, is this the calm before the storm? Are we going to actually come mid-cycle and have substantially more investments? Because we want to fix the problem.”

Pantazopoulos said that it was the risk tolerance of neither city admin nor city councillors that was important — it was Calgarians. Now, with a significantly bigger budget, asset management in the works, and expected outcomes on failures and leak mitigation, citizens can hold officials accountable.

He said that wasn’t in place before.

“Fundamentally, we’re… spending the money, we have the capital, and we have outcomes that we can clearly measure against and show Calgarians are making progress,” he said.

“I think that’s the difference.”