A new independent review of Calgary’s June 2024 Bearspaw south feedermain failure says the city spent two decades seeing the danger coming, then repeatedly pushing it aside — until the system finally broke and residents were hit with restrictions for nearly four months. The review was complied by a panel lead by Chair Siegfried Kiefer, the past honorary director, Office of the Chair, ATCO Ltd., and former President and Chief Executive Officer of Canadian Utilities Limited and Member, Office of the Chair, ATCO Ltd. He retired on July 1, 2021. At a press conference Wednesday morning, Kiefer, said systemic gaps were caused by ineffective management and a lack of governance oversight.The Bearspaw south feedermain is not a minor pipe. The panel notes it carries up to 60% of Calgary’s potable water and runs 10.8 km, with the 2024 rupture occurring in the 5.9 km prestressed concrete cylinder pipe (PCCP) section. The report says Calgary “narrowly” kept essential service levels by leaning heavily on the Glenmore water treatment plant — and warns that a similar outage during low winter flows, drought, or a key equipment failure could have triggered serious interruptions and even boil-water advisories. The panel’s central indictment is not that concrete pipe ages, but that Calgary’s internal risk response did not match what staff and studies were already flagging. The report says the risk of PCCP failure on the line was first identified about 20 years ago after the 2004 McKnight feedermain rupture, with repeated studies and assessments confirming the vulnerability. Yet the city kept deferring inspection, monitoring and mitigation — driven, the panel says, by an underestimated likelihood of failure and a failure to grasp the consequences. .The report also lays out why the feedermain remains a live concern today. It says acoustic monitoring data shows wire breaks in a 6 km portion of the 1,950 mm PCCP section at roughly six times industry experience, and AECOM identified about 20 weakened pipe segments with more than 25 wire breaks and an elevated probability of failure. While the city completed 29 repairs after the initial June 2024 rupture, the panel notes there are still about 20 pipes that fall within the city’s repair guideline and that no additional repairs have been completed — calling that a sign the city’s risk tolerance for critical infrastructure has been too high. To reduce the odds of another city-wide emergency, the panel pushes four urgent steps: deeper condition monitoring and segment-by-segment risk analysis, faster installation of transient pressure monitors (before the current mid-2026 plan), stricter procedures and training to prevent sudden pressure swings, and more serious emergency planning exercises to cut outage time. It also recommends a task force of experts to coordinate the risk work and accelerate mitigation. The biggest schedule shock is the panel’s demand to accelerate steel duplication of the vulnerable PCCP section..The city’s plan had the duplication fully operational by 2029, but the panel says that timeline leaves Calgary exposed for years and calls for completion in 12–14 months, using emergency procurement procedures and a dedicated senior project leader with authority to pull in private-sector expertise and specialized contractors. Beyond immediate pipe work, the panel recommends a governance overhaul aimed at stopping “nobody owns the risk” culture.It calls for consolidating core functions into a dedicated water utility department led by a chief operating officer reporting to the CAO, paired with segmented financial statements to better link spending to performance and long-term decisions. It also recommends an independent expert water utility oversight board of five members to provide council with expert advice on reliability, major capital spending, and risk mitigation — filling what the report describes as historical gaps in expert review of major decisions. The stakes are not small. The panel describes Calgary’s utility as one of the largest and most complex in Canada, serving more than 1.8 million residents across an integrated network of over 16,000 km of pipe, with annual operating costs of $380 million and a capital budget exceeding $1 billion. .In that context, the panel’s message to city hall is blunt: this is critical infrastructure, not a nice-to-have, and the cost of delay is another forced crisis—only next time, Calgary may not be able to rely on good timing and favourable conditions to skate through. The review will be presented to a special meeting of city council Wednesday at 1:30pm.
