Zoë Decker always thought the little hillock between 16th Avenue N.W. and the Montgomery Safeway’s parking lot was a bit weird.
“It’s like the grassy knoll where the shooter shot JFK,” she says. Weirder still, though, while driving west on 16th Avenue on a June afternoon in 2024, she found the knoll gone altogether, with a gush of water arcing out of the ground in its place.
The Bearspaw South Feeder Main had burst underground and exploded the knoll, strewing rocks and debris and flooding the road.
Decker decided to drive through the rising water. “That was a mistake,” she admits, but her car got through. Most other drivers avoided the rising water and peeled off in a panic into the Safeway parking lot to figure out another route. “It was pandemonium,” Decker says.
In response, The City swiftly imposed a boil-water advisory on Bowness. The advisory rattled Decker at first. She didn’t know if showering was safe, for example, nor how long to boil water for her tea. “The unknown is really hard to deal with when you don’t have enough information,” she says. “You don’t know if stuff that you’re doing is going to make you sick.”
Despite these communication issues, Decker sympathized with city council — in particular with then-Mayor Jyoti Gondek.
“What a crazy situation that must have been to enter into your first term as mayor and then everyone’s pointing fingers at you,” Decker says. Many of the accusations crossed the border from reasonable into the unhinged. “My partner’s uncle literally thought that Jyoti damaged the pipe herself,” says Decker. “Wow, to live in his world.”
The 2024 feeder main failure wasn’t the first municipal water crisis Decker endured (she was in Cape Town, South Africa in 2018 during what Bloomberg News called the “largest drought-induced municipal water failure in modern history”), and it wouldn’t be the last. In December 2025, when Decker learned on social media that the Bearspaw South Feeder Main had failed again, she frantically messaged everyone she knew in Bowness and told them to collect as much water as they could.
Fortunately, Bowness residents weren’t as affected by the second break, but their neighbours in Parkdale, Point MacKay and Montgomery rang in the New Year by boiling their drinking water.
From Decker’s perspective, city council had learned lessons from the first break and seemed better prepared for the second. In March, The City opened the Bearspaw South Feeder Main Community Resource Centre at the Bowness Community Association. The centre aimed to keep surrounding residents informed about all things water-related.
Decker was most impressed by The City making social workers available to community members at the centre. In addition to receiving information about the practicalities of water, stressed residents could talk to trained professionals about the personal strain the crisis caused. After all, the water main failure wasn’t just an infrastructure problem, but an emotional one.
Not Just a Water Problem
“One of the truths of working in infrastructure is that no one cares until it breaks,” says Kerry Black, Canada Research Chair in the University of Calgary’s Department of Civil Engineering and associate professor at the Schulich School of Engineering. This truism makes expensive infrastructure investments, like water-system maintenance, a difficult sell to citizens. “You’re faced with a situation where either you proactively invest in something that no one cares about, or you have to reactively fix a big mess,” Black says. “Those are your two political realities.”
And thanks to Calgary’s recent “big mess,” infrastructure is on Calgarians’ minds. “Two years ago, I could never have had this many conversations about pipes with people and had people care,” says Black. “They would have fallen asleep.”
Despite the undeniable inconveniences of the feeder main breaks, the incident has compelled Calgarians to think hard about water infrastructure. “We’ve come to expect access to water at any time, at any moment, for as long and as much as we want,” says Black.
The moral of Calgary’s feeder main saga might be a reconsideration of these expectations. “We’re headed towards a time and place where we’re not going to have the luxury of doing what we’ve always done,” Black adds. Climate change has resulted in milder winters, reduced snow accumulation and subsequently lower summer river flows. There will be less water for more people.
Sure enough, The City established a new water-efficiency plan in April 2026 to curtail non-essential water use. The new rules allow outdoor sprinkler watering for only half of all households at a time, for example, and only up to three days per week depending on street addresses (but never, oddly, on Mondays). Washing cars and windows, and filling outdoor hot tubs and wading pools, will be prohibited altogether when water levels are particularly low. Other jurisdictions have already adopted such policies. Kelowna, Abbotsford and Mission, B.C., similarly curtail water use.
And it’s not just restrictions on the horizon. Much of the infrastructure across the country was built around the same time as the Bearspaw South Feeder Main — and built quickly. Black predicts more failures ahead.
“Water. Wastewater. Roadways. Public infrastructure like community centres and schools. All of that is getting to the end of life,” Black warns. “We’re going to need major investments across a huge number of assets.”
Calgary’s recent crisis should be seen as a harbinger of potential failures to come for communities across Canada.
An Eye on the Future
Mayor Jeromy Farkas wasn’t completely surprised when he heard about the failure of the feeder main in 2024. A major water pipeline in Cochrane had ruptured only nine months earlier, and the former councillor and future mayor knew aging infrastructure had been failing in municipalities across Canada.
What surprised Farkas, though, was the acute vulnerability of Calgary’s water system. “I was quite shocked that Calgary would have a water pipe that was so existential,” he says. The Bearspaw South Feeder Main supplies 60 per cent of Calgary’s water. “I had no idea. And I was relatively close to the topic as a city councillor.”
The Calgarian response to the crisis, in both 2024 and 2025-26, impressed Farkas. “Everyone, or at least most people, seem willing to work together as a team to dig our way out of it,” he says.
The City is on track to replace the feeder main by the end of the year — a tremendous achievement — thanks to the efforts of workers and citizens. “Not just the guys in the trenches, literally, who are 100 feet underground digging in six different sections simultaneously,” Farkas says. There was also the regular Calgarians who rallied together to reduce their water usage (according to the Mayor, most did).
That’s why Farkas describes the feeder main replacement as Calgary’s “civic moonshot” — a technically challenging problem to be solved by both experts and regular folks. “It really just shows Calgary at its best, where we’re able to bounce back from disasters like these.”
An independent review panel struck to examine the feeder main failure found that Calgary’s water infrastructure can support a city of up to 2.8 million people. Farkas believes the population of Calgary’s metropolitan area, which includes municipalities as far afield as Chestermere and Cochrane, will exceed this threshold before the end of the next decade.
The flow of the Bow River, however, won’t increase. With the slowing flow of Calgary’s waterways, Calgarians will need to adapt to this scarcity, and not just by turning off the faucet when we brush our teeth — something Farkas confesses he only recently started doing. But the mayor knows that water savings can be found.
For example, Calgary loses a quarter of its treated water in its water pipes. “We could choose to take 25 per cent more out of the river,” Farkas says, “or we can stem the bleeding” by patching the holes and fixing the leaks.
Farkas wants the municipal government he leads to be known as the “infrastructure city council” that confronts the water main issue directly “rather than passing the buck and making it the next generation’s problem. Or the next mayor’s problem.”
And he believes citizens will come on board, even when the price tag is vast. “I think Calgarians are willing to support the investment as long as it’s prudent, reasonable and if there’s a long-term need for it,” Farkas says.
According to the mayor, such efforts exist outside of politics. Eighty per cent of Calgarians reduced their water usage during the latest round of restrictions, which means that most citizens took part in the collective action, regardless of political leanings. “This is not a political question,” says Farkas. “It’s more like the law of supply and demand. Or the law of gravity.”
Perhaps the long-term legacy of the feeder main crisis won’t simply be a shiny steel pipe buried beneath Bowness and Montgomery. The awareness of our infrastructural fragility may compel Calgarians to give their blessing to expensive, but necessary, projects and to recognize the value and vulnerability of the things we depend upon but cannot see.
“If there was a moment in time when infrastructure is sexy again,” Farkas says, “it’s probably now.”
Water Main Timeline
1975
Bearspaw South Feeder Main installed, built using pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipe (PCCP)
2004
McKnight Feeder Main break exposed vulnerabilities in PCCP infrastructure
2009
Bearspaw South Feeder Main deemed to require internal inspection
2011
Infrastructure Vulnerability Assessment and Water Long Range Plan completed by The City
2017
Tactical Asset Management Plan marks Bearspaw South Feeder Main as “high-risk”
2020
Bearspaw South Feeder Main prioritized for condition assessment, but the assessment is prevented by access limitations
Jun. 2024
First Bearspaw South Feeder Main break
Aug. 2024
Urgent repairs made on 21 sections of pipeline
Dec. 2025
Second Bearspaw South Feeder Main break
Mar. 2026
More reinforcement projects undertaken to secure the feeder main
Apr. 2026
Council passes Calgary’s new Water Efficiency Plan. Replacement pipe anticipated to be in service by December 2026