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Water main break discussion

I ain't no civil engineer, but is it not a design flaw to have one pipe so critical to the water supply system that it can cause this much of a problem?

Why not have twin 5' pipes rather than this monster 8' pipe? Build some redundancy into the network.
 
Tough to justify redundancy with tax dollars maybe? everyone is super critical of how taxes are spent that sometimes we may end up making the wrong decision. Just my thoughts anyway...
 
There's probably a cost component and available space issue. Twin pipes next to each other won't really do much considering if one burst, the other is probably severely damaged too, and two pipes to maintain instead of one. Two redundancy lines, they'll essentially need two ROW that is large enough can feed into the system.

Looking at the Vancouver map, they have 3 reservoirs. The city centre seems to have some redundancy, but hard to tell how big these pipes are. But the entire Coquitlam reservoir is supplied through a single supply line, a break there would be catastrophic too. https://gis.metrovancouver.org/mvmaps/Water
 
artvandelay said:
I ain't no civil engineer, but is it not a design flaw to have one pipe so critical to the water supply system that it can cause this much of a problem?

Why not have twin 5' pipes rather than this monster 8' pipe? Build some redundancy into the network.
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The thought is that the chance of failure before 70 years was meant to be infinitesimally small, so the risk is close equal. 10 years from now a parallel replacement would have been contemplated, at which point the original could have been taken out of service and relined at a lower capacity.

The cost of two 5 foot pipes is likely way more than one large pipe.

Anyways, found the data set, which the city has in a nice visualizer.

Here are the concrete pipes installed between 1969 and 1981.
1718651657084.png


Public Water Main Locations | Open Calgary

Water main assets owned and operated by the City of Calgary for the distribution of drinking water.
data.calgary.ca data.calgary.ca
 
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Stampede is a go, city says we can accommodate the extra people. The comments section is blowing up with people who will stop conserving if we can handle an extra couple hundred thousand guests...
 
Mountain Man said:
Stampede is a go, city says we can accommodate the extra people. The comments section is blowing up with people who will stop conserving if we can handle an extra couple hundred thousand guests...
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I always wondered how much temporary population growth occurs as a result of big events like Stampede that attract outside tourists. My suspicion is the number is a lot lower than it might appear - particularly because it's not really in anyone's interested to be accurate (i.e. more reasonable) when estimating the economic and tourism benefits. Convention centres have a common bias in their demand forecasting where they always over count out-of-town visitors, when most convention centre traffic ends up being local attendees (and therefore the hotel and tourism spin-offs are less than forecast because locals don't need those things).

For example, if 100,000 people are at the Stampede grounds each day, are 50,000 from out of town? 10,000? How many Calgarians are out of town that week on holidays of their own? The equation on if we are going to use less or more water because of a limited-term tourism event is happening seems complex - probably most obvious is the 1,000+ cows/horses that clearly don't live here full-time - assuming cows drink tap water when in the city, they don't usually in pasture.

It gets more complex too - not all tourists are here the whole time, and it's the individual daily net population gain we care about when related to water. Do tourists even use as much water as a household? I don't think there's much laundry going on for short vacations. Calgarians are leaving and returning from their own vacations all the time too.

Lots of variables at play, I wonder if anyone has estimated a realistic "current day population" during stampede = current population of Calgary + tourists visiting - Calgarians out of town.
 
CBBarnett said:
I always wondered how much temporary population growth occurs as a result of big events like Stampede that attract outside tourists. My suspicion is the number is a lot lower than it might appear - particularly because it's not really in anyone's interested to be accurate (i.e. more reasonable) when estimating the economic and tourism benefits. Convention centres have a common bias in their demand forecasting where they always over count out-of-town visitors, when most convention centre traffic ends up being local attendees (and therefore the hotel and tourism spin-offs are less than forecast because locals don't need those things).

For example, if 100,000 people are at the Stampede grounds each day, are 50,000 from out of town? 10,000? How many Calgarians are out of town that week on holidays of their own? The equation on if we are going to use less or more water because of a limited-term tourism event is happening seems complex - probably most obvious is the 1,000+ cows/horses that clearly don't live here full-time - assuming cows drink tap water when in the city, they don't usually in pasture.

It gets more complex too - not all tourists are here the whole time, and it's the individual daily net population gain we care about when related to water. Do tourists even use as much water as a household? I don't think there's much laundry going on for short vacations. Calgarians are leaving and returning from their own vacations all the time too.

Lots of variables at play, I wonder if anyone has estimated a realistic "current day population" during stampede = current population of Calgary + tourists visiting - Calgarians out of town.
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Here's an article that mentions a few numbers: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-stampede-water-shortage-analysis-1.7237437

As for all the Stampede visitors who need to flush and wash, Tourism Calgary CEO Alisha Reynolds said the city's hotels expect 138,000 people staying here. But that's offset by the many Calgarians who leave town during the event.​
​
That's a big number - but the daily total? 13,800 / day, with likely some weekend peak where there's more visitors and some days with fewer. There's probably a few more thousand that visit family or stay in Airbnbs that aren't counted here.

Either way, that's actually not many visitors in a city of 1.3 million (~1%) - we probably lose at least that many Calgarians to the mountains on any summer weekend. Important to remember we always have some visitors here so the baseline use of water already accounts for some, as well as some level of Calgarians travelling out of city at any time.

So as to water? I go back to the animals - that's probably your only measurable source of new water demand during Stampede. Even that, it's not like horses take showers - a few hundred litres of water for animals each per day * 1,000 animals would still hardly be noticed in the data I would think. Good PR though for Stampede to be responsible given the shortage, even if in the end the impact might not be that measurable either way. Every drop counts, after all.
 
Mountain Man said:
So much for the idea that the population of Calgary doubles during Stampede.
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It's an information gap that boosters for stadiums, tourist boards and convention centres continually exploit - and water usage data may actually reveal a different and more accurate story.

It sure *feels* busy during Stampede, but is it really more or just a shuffling and concentrating of activity that would happen anyways? Probably a bit of both - but 17th Avenue feels super busy all summer, Stampede included. Would it be just as busy if Stampede didn't happen?

Do Calgarians leave town during stampede week in big numbers, as often claimed? If true, does that exodus and reduction in usage and activity, counteract all the net new activity that comes in from tourism? Are the gain and exodus equal in magnitude?

If we didn't have Stampede and people just acted normally would they spend less money or the same money just on normal stuff? For example, I might not party it up for a week straight without Stampede, but I also might not take the rest of the summer off from partying either.

Big questions that are hard to answer - which is why Stampede and tourism boosters don't try to answer it accurately. It's in their interest to highlight the benefits and not worry so much about the data that points any other direction.
 
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Mountain Man said:
I seriously doubt that the same numbers of people leave that visit, the city is definitely much busier.
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I wonder how we'd prove this though? I agree, I assume there's some net increase in people - but is it because they all party downtown for a week? or are they actually net new people?

Put another way - I'd take a wild, uneducated guess that the Saturday afternoon patio traffic between a 12 degree day in January and a 25 degree in July day on 17th Avenue is up about 1,000%. These people weren't magically created in summer though - they were just doing other things in winter in other locations (staying home, skiing, whatever etc.). Things got way busier on 17th Ave but there was no overall growth - just reshuffling what proportion wanted to hang on 17th Ave v. anywhere else they could hang. Beltline's effective Saturday evening population in January is probably about 30,000; in July it's probably more like 50,000 or something.

For Stampede, part of the story is a similar phenomenon happening - everyone concentrates in the core and the Stampede Grounds, but in return they empty out of their "winter spots" like neighbourhood pubs and restaurants not downtown. Teenagers and families, for example, are barely visible in the city centre most of the year apart from around schools - tens of thousands head for the grounds each day for a week. But that means they aren't hanging out in their normal places either - it's a relocation, not growth.

Back to the water - if there's a net increase in usage during Stampede (in a measurable way that somehow is provable beyond random day-to-day fluctuations), then the answer if probably a net increase in people played a part. If usage is the same, perhaps it's more of a reshuffling story combined with net gain in tourists, and a similar sized loss in locals for tourism of their own elsewhere.

I doubt the water volume data could actually reveal that level of detail and accuracy to prove anything I said - but seems about as close of a real data point as would exist to me? Still, this might be as close as we ever come to having a real data set that measures "impact" of an event like Stampede (as it relates to water at least).
 
A new visitor to the city is likely consuming much less than 350L average per capita. They'll eat out most of the day and not do many of the water consuming activities (watering lawns, washing cars, laundry). Not to mention more of the city's population is out and about, which I'd think reduces water usage. Commercial appliances, toilets, facilities are likely more water efficient than most homes.

The city definitely sounds more relaxed about the issue in recent press conferences. From the sounds of it, a big concern of theirs was the parts to do the repairs, and the potential wait involved. Now that it's been sourced (with 2 from San Diego), the timeline is much more predictable that their modelling probably see us safely above the catastrophe levels.
 
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