Former mayor Naheed Nenshi said he and city council did not know Calgary’s water system was at high risk 2017 when the Bearspaw feeder main was flagged for inspection.
City officials repeatedly recommended an inspection of Calgary’s key water feeder main in 2017, 2019 and 2022, according to an independent review of the Bearspaw’s catastrophic 2024 break.
But the inspections were continuously delayed, the report notes, and multiple city councils didn’t receive the expert information and support needed to oversee Calgary’s water system.
Nenshi, who served as mayor from 2010 to 2021, said he and council didn’t receive information in 2017 that the Bearspaw was marked as high-risk.
“The report is saying that that kind of information didn’t filter up to the key decision-makers, which is a big problem,” Nenshi said on CBC Radio’s The Calgary Eyeopener on Thursday.
He currently leads Alberta’s NDP opposition.
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The 2024 Bearspaw feeder main’s break led to months of water restrictions, which is a situation Calgarians again find themselves in after another catastrophic break occurred last week.
The independent panel report, released Wednesday, found deep and systemic challenges within Calgary’s water system that dated back decades. The report notes a risk in the Bearspaw was first identified after a pipe in northeast Calgary ruptured in 2004, an event which Nenshi said he only learned about in 2024, well after his time in office ended.
Nenshi said a mistake the city made during his tenure was to focus on growth and building pipes in new parts of the city, at the expense of needed maintenance for existing infrastructure.
An independent review of the 2024 Bearspaw south feeder main failure urges action from Calgary city council to secure water supply, but the costs to fix the city’s current system remain unclear.
While the report found gaps in the information and support council received, Nenshi said he takes some responsibility for errors that were made during his time in office.
“I can’t say this was all administration’s fault because your job, as the board if you like, as city council, is to make sure that you are asking all the right questions and digging deeply in all the right ways,” said Nenshi.
“Clearly we should have been digging more deeply, and I will take responsibility for that.”
Nenshi said city hall made cuts across the board after an economic downturn in 2015, including to water-system maintenance, to keep taxes and fees low for residents who were worried about the cost of living.
As a result, the resilience of Calgary’s water system was weakened.
“The population grew and [the Bearspaw] turned out to be more critical than we thought it was in terms of demand, but also, as we know, more dangerous than we thought it would be,” said Nenshi.
Danielle Smith placed blame on Nenshi
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith weighed in on the question of accountability for Calgary’s recent water main breaks, last week.
Smith placed some of the blame on Nenshi, now her political rival. She criticized Nenshi for not inspecting the Bearspaw after major flooding hit the city in 2013.
“After the [2013] floods, for 10 years they didn’t bother to do any investigation on the water main, and you have to ask the question: well huh, who was the mayor… and that was Naheed Nenshi,” the premier told reporters last week.
“All of this should have been identified early, so that now subsequent mayors are not having to deal with it.”
Nenshi called the premier’s comments “total garbage,” pointing to the lack of any feeder main breaks while he was mayor. He said the provincial government was looking for someone to blame for political gain.
Smith also suggested the province will consider imposing more oversight over Calgary’s water system, similar to how it regulates other utilities like natural gas and electricity. But Nenshi argues Calgary has more expertise already in place to run its own water supply.
“It would be wasteful and getting in the way of elected officials for the province to jump in,” said Nenshi.
An independent panel says ‘a culture of deferral and high risk tolerance’ contributed to the June 2024 Bearspaw south feeder main break — but here’s why Calgarians should be disappointed, not angry.
“Where the province should jump in is with infrastructure funding. The province has systematically defunded infrastructure across governments of different stripes for a really, really long time, and certainly this is where we need the assistance.”
Administration also takes responsibility
Calgary’s head administrator, David Duckworth, said his organization is ready to implement the panel’s recommendations, and also accepted responsibility for the current emergency situation the city finds itself in.
“I personally take responsibility and am accountable for the services that we deliver every single day, and so does my team,” said Duckworth, Calgary’s chief administrative officer since 2019, and general manager of the utilities department before that.
“We take this very seriously. We apologize to Calgarians for being where we are today.”
Duckworth said his main takeaway from the report is that over two decades, members of city administration lacked the ability to escalate concerns. He said the city needs to do a better job to understand trade-offs in the budget between more immediate concerns and infrastructure work that could be critical in the future.
Council moving forward with panel recommendations
Siegfried Kiefer, a former ATCO executive who chaired the independent panel, said his report found the city’s risk management work wasn’t as thorough as the panel expected.
That led to appropriate information not reaching city council.
Kiefer added there’s no way for council to digest the risks of every line item they’re responsible for, but that it’s critical for city management to flag what should be raised to the attention of decision-makers in city hall.
“Insufficient detail was provided all the way up the chain to senior executives in the administration and hence into council,” he said on The Calgary Eyeopener on Thursday.
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He added part of the problem comes from assessments finding that smaller ruptures in smaller pieces of pipe were more urgent, rather than high-consequence but low-likelihood pipe breaks.
City council voted on Wednesday to move forward with all of the panel’s recommendations, which included accelerating work to twin the Bearspaw main by early next year, and establishing a dedicated water utility department and ultimately a city-owned corporation.
Nenshi said the decision to introduce a new utility company is up to the current council, but he warned the city can learn from what worked and didn’t work with the city-owned electrical provider Enmax, after it led to much higher costs.
‘Extreme pressure’ to fund growth
If blame should be placed anywhere for Calgary’s catastrophic breaks, one former city councillor suggested the city’s sprawling growth pattern is a prime target.
“Finding out you never had a complete picture is always frustrating,” said Pincott, who represented Ward 11 from 2007 to 2017.
“We were struggling so much trying to get a handle on new growth.”
But he added he’s unsure if the city would have acted differently if it had more knowledge about how the water system had deteriorated, because of all the pressure council felt at the time to fund growth.
Druh Farrell, who represented Ward 7 from 2001 to 2021, said Thursday that councillors were warned decisions on underground utilities can be easily deferred one year at a time. But when they fail, they fail big.
She echoed Pincott’s comments about the pressures to keep supporting suburban expansions.
“We knew that came at a cost, that with the same amount of funds spreading butter over too much bread, that we needed to make some concessions on lifecycle maintenance.”
City hall managers were feeling pretty good about the state of the water system a decade ago, Roy Brander said.
Brander was a former senior infrastructure engineer engineer for Calgary Waterworks — the former name of the city’s water services department — until he retired in 2016.
But he said mid-level engineers were recommending a second feeder main be constructed as far back as 2016.
“Nobody should ever trust a single piece of infrastructure for anything that vital. There should always be redundancy,” said Brander.
“As long as the people are showing up, they should have recognized the money was there to build that second main, and now we’re building it very late. That was a great failure of high-level management.”
He noticed that as city administration grew, it became more difficult for engineers to quickly raise concerns to management.
“You’re properly listened to by your boss, who discounts about 10 or 20 per cent of what you say, and he’s listened to by his boss who discounts another 20 per cent,” said Brander.
“If there’s four levels between you and getting approval to spend money, half of your concerns may be deprecated and ignored.”
However, the new panel report focuses too much on high-level decision-making rather than what engineers can do differently, Brander said.
To him, it also doesn’t place enough attention on the effect using road salt has had on corroding the city’s pipes.
But as a path forward for Calgary’s water system, Brander argued more money should be made available in future city budgets for necessary infrastructure maintenance. This point which he said should have been clear as Calgary’s population boomed, he said.
