Live updates: Calgary city council discusses formal water-main report

An independent review of Calgary’s most serious water infrastructure failure in decades is calling for urgent and far-reaching reforms.

Mayor Jeromy Farkas and city council sat down on Wednesday, Jan. 7, for a special meeting to discuss a formal report submitted by an independent panel tasked with investigating the cause of the 2024 Bearspaw South Feeder-main failure.

6 p.m.

Council recess.

5:14 p.m.

Michael Thompson:

“We need to move faster than we’ve ever done things before. Our risk tolerance and our urgency changed last Tuesday. And we have to move as fast as we can to get this new pipe installed, because that’s what’s going to bring us -- reduce our vulnerability with this existing pipe.”

5:12 p.m.

Michael Thompson:

“With respect to the third piece, which is the replacement pipe, we are looking at all options to accelerate that as fast as possible. And when I say all options, I mean work that we have never done before at the City of Calgary, that you haven’t seen us do before. I don’t have a plan in place that I need to come to you right now, but I think you heard from the independent panel chair before the words ”unshackling." We will be back to you if we feel shackled in any way."

5:11 p.m.

Michael Thompson:

“As I mentioned publicly either do them if the pipe breaks again, we will be ready to repair that and do that as reinforcements or we will wait until the spring and then take that pipe out of service.”

5:10 p.m.

Michael Thompson:

“Number two is the urgent reinforcement projects that we have underway. We do not need any direction from council right now. We have a group stood up that is ready to go, that do those reinforcements. The question is when do we do them?”

5:09 p.m.

Michael Thompson:

“Three pieces right now when you’re talking about acceleration. Number 1, the existing repair. That is going well, and we are moving as fast as we can to get that pipe repaired and back in service.”

4:57 p.m.

Panel:

“We have a duty to replace a certain quantity of our stock on an ongoing basis. We need to fund that through ongoing rates, so maintenance costs are not, you know, unless they are life things that are amortized over time, they are things that are paid for in real time, and that’s just good utility discipline with respect to great making funding of those programs and sticking to them.”

4:56 p.m.

Panel:

“Accommodating (municipal) growth has been done by in effect robbing from some of the sustainment work that should have been ongoing on a sustainable basis.”

4:20 p.m.

Kiefer:

“It’s going to be difficult to ask Calgarians to conserve (water) when we indeed are losing that quantity of water somewhere in the system, and so -- and I know the city is underway with the metering project to begin the process of breaking down zones within the city so they can narrow down where they need to investigate this water loss. Again -- hindsight 20/20.”

4:19 p.m.

Kiefer:

“Again, they need to implement district metering so that you can understand what water is making it from A to B. That can help you narrow down where you need to look for this water loss. It’s an important element of investment going forward.”

4:18 p.m.

Kiefer:

“Obviously the water is escaping somewhere. It may be difficult to detect from rising to the surface perspective, but that’s where metering comes into play on your system.”

4:17 p.m.

In reply to a question about water loss, Siegfried Kiefer:

“What we found quite remarkable if you look at water loss historically in the city -- there was a dramatic change that started to happen in that 2016-17 time period where it -- I would have to look up exact numbers -- but water loss went from 15 per cent to the 22 that it is today, and I guess the first thing I would remark is that there was no real investigation into what was driving that loss.”

3:30 p.m.

Council breaks for 30 minutes

3:13 p.m.

Panel:

“What had crept into the city’s management culture was acceptance of – or a tolerance of – I’m going to say too high a risk level for an essential service utility operation….We’ve got to change our risk tolerance level, and we need to increase the urgency with which we deal with these issues. It’s a cultural shift.”

3:05 p.m.

Panel:

“We saw the persistent underestimation of the probability that this would happen. There is a mindset throughout this period that this was a low likelihood event, not really understanding what was the mechanisms that were happening to him or deferring inspection, deferring understanding what was happening with the line. Almost convincing themselves in a situation with a lot of cost pressure, they didn’t need to do it. They could put it off.”

2:39 p.m.

Wyness:

“So if there’s no gold star standard, what’s the benefit to Calgarians on making such a dramatic shift?”

Kiefer:

“This model fits in the mainstream of what’s done at the highest levels of water maintenance in North America.”

2:36 p.m.

Wyness says given Montreal has PCC pipe failures, why wasn’t that unpacked a bit more?

Kiefer says the focus was on Montreal because they had the same vintage of pipe, but they had different redundancy of routing of water, so the focus was on the resilience of their pipes and different work structures. Kiefer says no city researched had the “gold star” standard of water infrastructure, but this report looked at the best solutions.

2:35 p.m.

Ward 2 Coun. Jennifer Wyness asks question about the report referring to Montreal organizational structure of water utilities.

Report author Stephen Stanley says the report looked at multiple cities and Montreal has someone in charge of water utilities and it is a separate department in the city.

2:34 p.m.

Johnston refers to a past Calgary Herald article that says it was specifically former mayor Gondek who initiated the review.

Duckworth says he consulted Gondek, but it was him as CAO who initiated the review

2:32 p.m.

The first question comes from Ward 14 Coun. Landon Johnston, asking Duckworth how the review was initiated?

Duckworth says he and former Gondek had a conversation on being as objective as possible. Duckworth then called for an independent review process.

2:31 p.m.

The Independent Review Panel has now wrapped up its presentation and will turn it over to council members now for questions.

2:29 p.m.

Kiefer:

“We are sitting on a ticking time bomb of water reliability... the only way we see getting through this is getting that parallel steel line accelerated along the current Bearspaw South Feeder Main.”

2:24 p.m.

Crothers:

“We believe water utilities needs to be its own department with its own leadership surrounded by city support structure which would mean a dedicated CEO reporting to the city’s CAO to allow for final decision making that is able to balance cost affordability and service level components of water delivery. Establishing a Water Utility Oversight Board also allows us to give advice to the council and the leadership.”

2:19 p.m.

Crothers:

“We continue to manage a single point of failure risk and we have a set of urgent recommendations, which include stabilizing the Bearspaw Feedermain, strengthening emergency preparedness and contingency planning to reduce the duration and impact of future outages and accelerate construction of a steel pipeline parallel to the feeder main to eliminate the single point of failure and enhance system redundancy.”

2:18 p.m.

Crothers:

“With 60 per cent of water going through one line there’s no redundancy and that hasn’t been given enough attention. On top of that there’s been no independent governance and many other cities have benefitted from that second opinion.”

2:16 p.m.

Michael Crothers, vice-chair of this report, now speaking.

There were no financial statements of what was being put at risk when it came to water infrastructure projects. “That underinvestment resulted in a build up of unresilient assets.”

2:14 p.m.

Kiefer:

We have a longer term solution of establishing a municipal water corporation, but that is recommended down the line as we are in an emergency right now.

2:13 p.m.

Kiefer:

We made recommendations on enhanced planning, reinforcement work and ultimately the replacement of this pipe that is failing us now. We want to set up a management team that is held accountable for the service levels achieved and the investments they recommend, all of which will be done under a body of expertise.

2:12 p.m.

Kiefer:

Your water utility is the third largest in the country, three billion dollars in assets and it deserves a dedicated management team to serve long term interests.

2:11 p.m.

Kiefer:

We found systemic gaps in the city’s watermain utility and way it was operated. Risks were not identified, outlined or dealt with at a senior level and there was no management accountability which included insufficient expert oversight for an operation this complex that requires expert knowledge.

2:10 p.m.

Kiefer:

We interviewed over 90 city staff members and several outside experts with evaluating the risk of the South Bearspaw Feeder Main

2:06 p.m.

Kiefer says he apologizes for late release of report at 9 p.m. last night but hopes this meeting will help unpack any questions that council members have.

2:04 p.m.

Independent Water Review Panel Chair Siegfried Kiefer now speaking to council to present findings and recommendations following the completion of this nine-month report.

1:57 p.m.

CAO Duckworth outlines timeline for the Bearspaw Feeder Main Independent Review Panel.

1:53 p.m. CAO David Duckworth

“Calgary is facing challenges of a main feedermain break just like we did in June of 2024. On June 5th, 2024 our city changed forever. That event set in motion a journey for me to call this independent review. From the outset our goal was clear to improve a growing metropolitan city.

I am here today to provide a clear overview of how this review was established....

1:50 p.m.

Council discussing break times for this discussion. A 30-minute break would be scheduled at 3:15 p.m. The standard dinner recess would begin at 6 p.m. and conclude at 7:15 p.m. 9:30 p.m. would be the stop time for this meeting.

1:46 p.m.

Wyness says she’s made her argument and wants to see the meeting run like an executive meeting.

1:45 p.m.

Farkas says he will allow for two rounds of questions.

1:42 p.m. Ward 2 Councillor Jennifer Wyness

“This report was supposed to go to executive council next week but because we are now in a special meeting we are limited in how many questions we can ask, so I am putting in a motion to run this like an executive council meeting.”

“I want unlimited questions. We received this report at 9 p.m.... we didn’t sleep much, we’ve barely processed what we’ve read.”

1:40 p.m. Mayor Farkas

“Today’s meeting is about transparency, what happened, why it happened and what must change.”

“That includes the good, the bad and the uncomfortable -- we owe it to residents to get this right.”

1:38 p.m. Mayor Jeromy Farkas opens special meeting of council by thanking Calgarians for reducing their water consumption.

Bearspaw feedermain ‘highly vulnerable to future failures,’ report finds

“It’s made a real difference but I want to plainly and transparently say we continue to remain in the red zone for water use and need to do everything we can to reduce water consumption.”

Farkas goes on to thank fire responders and construction crews for their hard work.

An independent review of Calgary’s most serious water infrastructure failure in decades is calling for a fundamental overhaul of how the city manages, oversees and plans its water system, warning that without major reforms, similar disruptions remain likely.

The Bearspaw South Feedermain Independent Review Panel released its final report Tuesday, concluding the June 2024 rupture of a critical water main — followed by a second failure in December 2025 — was not an isolated technical breakdown, but the result of long-standing and unaddressed systemic weaknesses.

“Without urgent action and long-term reform, the reliability of one of Canada’s largest and most complex municipal water systems remains at significant risk,” the panel said in its report.

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The June 5, 2024, rupture forced city-wide water restrictions for nearly four months and brought Calgary close to losing essential water service, according to the panel’s findings.

The more recent failure on Dec. 30, 2025, which remains under investigation, further underscores the urgency of the panel’s recommendations.

“Water is vital to every citizen and to our economy,” said panel chair Siegfried Kiefer.

“The water system demands a distinct management structure and team, with expert oversight to ensure long-term, safe, reliable and affordable service.”

Failure exposed fragile system

The Bearspaw South Feedermain is a 1,950-millimetre prestressed concrete cylinder pipe that carries treated water from the Bearspaw Water Treatment Plant into Calgary’s distribution system.

The panel said the feedermain can carry up to 60 per cent of the city’s potable water through a single line, making it one of Calgary’s most critical pieces of infrastructure.

During the 2024 outage, Calgary avoided a more severe emergency only by relying heavily on the Glenmore Water Treatment Plant while summer reservoir volumes remained favourable.

“This is an emergency situation,” Kiefer said.

“Calgarians don’t need to go to sleep at night thinking, ‘well, maybe tomorrow I won’t be able to have my shower because the pipe has failed again.’”

The panel warned the current outage is occurring under more precarious conditions, with winter reservoir inflows significantly lower, increasing the risk to water supply if further failures occur.

The report found that had the 2024 rupture coincided with low river flows, winter conditions or mechanical issues at the Glenmore plant, Calgary could have faced widespread service interruptions or boil-water advisories.

Warnings dating back two decades

According to the panel, vulnerabilities in the Bearspaw South Feedermain were first flagged more than 20 years ago following a rupture of a similar prestressed concrete pipe at McKnight Boulevard in 2004.

“We’ve been aware of this problem around this vintage of pipe since 2004,” Kiefer said.

He said corrosion risks associated with pipes manufactured in the mid-1970s, particularly in chemically aggressive soil, were well documented both in Calgary and in other North American cities.

“Many other municipalities, based on that knowledge back in the mid-2000s, took more aggressive measures with respect to redundancy or inspection or maintenance on that network of pipe,” he said.

“We did not in Calgary.”

The panel described the city’s failure to act as “errors of omission,” pointing to deferred inspections, delayed redundancy projects and risk assessments that did not reach senior decision-makers in a clear or consistent way.

“This situation has arisen over decades of time,” Kiefer said.

“There’s not one single event in the last year or two that we could pin this type of outage upon.”

Kiefer said the panel deliberately avoided singling out individuals or specific councils, instead focusing on systemic failures that persisted over multiple administrations.

“I would not lay blame at the foot of any one individual or any one era of council,” Kiefer said.

“This problem existed, it repeated itself, and it did not surface to the right level of decision-making. Without the knowledge of the implications of those decisions, it’s very difficult to put blame on any specific point in time.”

He added the breakdown stemmed from weaknesses in how risk information moved through the organization, rather than deliberate decisions to ignore known dangers.

Fragmented governance and accountability

Beyond technical issues, the panel identified weaknesses in Calgary’s management structure and governance as central contributors to the failure.

The report said responsibility for water infrastructure risk was spread across multiple departments, diluting accountability and making it difficult to evaluate trade-offs between cost, reliability and long-term resilience.

“Trying to operate an essential service utility that requires risk-based decision-making in real time is not conducive to a matrix organization,” Kiefer said.

The panel found Calgary does not currently have a single executive responsible for water utility operations.

“This is a major utility,” Kiefer said.

“It’s one of the largest in Canada. Three billion dollars in assets. One billion dollars a year in revenue. This is not an inconsequential operation.”

Key recommendations

To address those gaps, the panel issued a set of interdependent recommendations, including both immediate actions and long-term structural reforms.

In the short term, the panel urged the city to stabilize the Bearspaw South Feedermain, enhance monitoring, strengthen emergency preparedness and accelerate construction of a steel pipeline running parallel to the existing line to eliminate a single point of failure.

“The current Bearspaw feedermain is in a state of disrepair,” Kiefer said.

“No matter how much patching we do to it, it will continue to be unreliable.”

The report identified accelerated construction of a steel replacement pipeline as the “ultimate solution” to restoring system stability.

Longer term, the panel called for embedding comprehensive risk and asset integrity processes across the water utility, eliminating other single points of failure and establishing a dedicated water utility department with a single accountable executive.

It also recommended creating an independent Water Utility Oversight Board composed of experts in infrastructure, finance, governance and risk management to advise council on long-term investment decisions.

“We are recommending an oversight board to oversee the operations of the management team and make informed advice to council,” Kiefer said.

The panel further suggested Calgary eventually transition the water utility into a municipally owned corporation to permanently entrench governance discipline, similar to utility models used elsewhere in Canada.

“We believe that moving to a formal corporate structure wholly owned by the city entrenches those disciplines of a board with fiduciary duty,” Kiefer said.

Mayor calls situation an emergency

Mayor Jeromy Farkas described the Bearspaw South Feedermain as a critical and ongoing risk, saying the city remains in an emergency situation while repairs and conservation measures continue.

“This Bearspaw feedermain, it is sick. It is terminally ill,” Farkas said.

“It is a ticking time bomb that can go off without a moment’s notice.”

Farkas said the panel’s findings provide clear direction on both what went wrong and how to fix it.

“We’ve been given some incredible advice including what went wrong, how it went wrong, why it went wrong, but most importantly, how we are going to fix this going forward so it never happens again,” he said.

He emphasized that while long-term governance reforms are necessary, immediate water conservation remains critical to public safety.

“We are very close to loss-of-life territory if current unsustainable water use continues,” Farkas said.

The mayor went on to urge residents to continue limiting water use, including shorter showers, fewer laundry loads and reduced toilet flushing, to ensure adequate supply for firefighters and emergency responders.

Councillor raises concerns over timing and governance

Ward 3 Coun. Jennifer Wyness expressed frustration with the timing of the report’s release, arguing council should focus first on restoring water service before debating long-term governance changes.

“I’m frustrated as a councillor that while the pipe is still broken and still being fixed, we are being distracted by a report,” Wyness said.

She said the city’s primary message should remain water conservation, particularly as winter river flows remain low and the Glenmore Reservoir continues to be drawn down.

“This is not a Calgary-only problem,” Wyness said. “If you live in Airdrie, Strathmore, Chestermere — you need to reduce your water.”

Wyness also raised concerns about council receiving the report late at night and being expected to consider major structural changes without adequate time for review.

“This is poor governance, and this is not what Calgarians have demanded of council,” she said.

She cautioned against immediately accepting all of the panel’s recommendations, including the creation of a new oversight board or a municipally owned utility, citing major cost concerns.

“Some of the recommendations for a new governance panel is adding to the cost so when I hear Calgarians saying, ‘why are your FTEs growing?’ It’s because of reports like this. Calgarians, on one hand, are demanding that we reduce the number of employees that we are hiring and yet I have an expert panel demanding that we grow the number of employees.”

“If council blindly accepts this report, that is the worst governance we could possibly do,” Wyness said.

Provincial government monitoring situation

The Alberta government said it is monitoring the situation closely and remains in contact with the City of Calgary.

“Alberta’s government is actively looking into the situation and considering whether or not more direct oversight is needed over water utilities,” said Alex Cattran, press secretary to the minister of infrastructure.

The province said the ministers of municipal affairs and public safety met with Calgary’s mayor earlier this week to discuss the situation and potential supports.

“Decisions about the operation and management of municipal water infrastructure remain the responsibility of the municipality,” the statement said.

Looking ahead

The panel said most of its recommendations could be implemented within 12 months, beginning with the recruitment of a dedicated water utility chief operating officer and an independent oversight board chair.

While acknowledging improvements already underway, the panel warned reforms must be implemented with urgency to prevent future failures.

“This is a critical public health asset,” the panel report said.

“Its stewardship requires a long-term, risk-based mindset that reflects its scale, complexity and importance to Calgarians and the region.”

The panel noted that the second failure involving the Bearspaw South Feedermain last month is under investigation and was not within the scope of its work. However, it said the latest incident underscores the ongoing relevance of its findings and recommendations.

Ultimately, the report frames the 2024 failure as a warning about the risks of managing essential infrastructure without sustained investment, clear accountability and expert oversight.

“The water system is one of the city’s most critical public health assets,” the panel wrote.

“Its stewardship requires a long-term, risk-based mindset that reflects its scale, complexity and importance to Calgarians and the region.”