Calgary moves goalposts for water usage, residents still push past limits

September 4, 2024 Canuck

Crews are still working 24 hours a day to repair issues along Calgary’s Bearspaw feeder main and, after consistently pushing past the limit on water use for several days, officials moved the mark.

Unfortunately, announcing the new limit hasn’t done much good as water use on Tuesday was 506 million litres – up 1 million litres from Monday.

During a media conference, the city’s director of infrastructure services announced that the water services team had come up with “new ways” to bring more water to Calgarians.

“One of the learnings was our ability to reconfigure existing pumps to reroute the flow of water,” Michael Thompson said on Tuesday.

Under this new configuration, Thompson said the city can reliably provide 485 million litres of water per day and up to 500 million litres by “straining” the system.

The City of Calgary has released updated water use data on Sept. 4, along with more details about what the system can and can’t handle over the next three weeks of repairs. (Supplied)

At that upper rate, Thompson said the city would find it difficult to fill underground storage tanks and pumps can’t be taken offline for maintenance.

“We are pushing and straining the system at its maximum.”

Any water use above that point means Calgary is “at a greater risk of running out of water.”

Thompson says he know Calgarians will be able to keep under this new limit for the next three weeks while repairs are ongoing.

“We’ve seen Calgarians reduce before we asked for these reductions. We were over 600 million litres.

“We’ve seen everyone be able to come together and reduce your indoor water use and stop your outdoor water use and we’re asking you to continue that for the next three weeks.”

The City of Calgary will provide another update on water main repairs at 2 p.m. MT.

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