YORKTON - A water main break in Calgary sent that city into a state of emergency as they worked to repair the major water line.
The restriction meant no outdoor water use and a plea for reduced water usage in general by residents, and while that seemed to resonate with most, there were more than 1,000 incidents reported of apparent continued water usage that was not allowed under the emergency ban.
It’s a sad thing to consider if someone was watering their lawn or washing a car in the midst of a city water crisis.
And, every little effort helped.
In one report at Yahoo news Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek suggested one fewer toilet flush per household could save the city roughly 12.5 million litres of water.
That statement puts a rather sharp focus on just how much water a city uses, and leaves one to wonder if better general conservation of such a critical resource isn’t needed.
But that is a question best answered down the road a stretch.
More immediate is whether the Calgary water main break is just an unusual occurrence, or whether it might prove to be just the first of many catastrophic breaks to urban infrastructure in the immediate future.
The Calgary water main that failed was apparently installed in 1975, so in terms of underground infrastructure not particularly old compared to metre after metre you would find in many communities – Yorkton included.
Whether age was the culprit in the failure in Calgary of course is not know, and there will be unique factors in most breaks, so pointing a finger at a general cause is rather difficult.
But as infrastructure ages it is more prone to failure.
That has been noted in several administrative reports to Yorkton Council in recent years.
It’s a known situation, but addressing that situation is almost impossible based on the sheer costs to upgrade all the aging infrastructure.
Over recent years in Yorkton efforts have been made to inch up the dollars invested in capital projects in the city, but when rising costs and general inflation are factored in, the gain is less than one might like.
But, with property taxes on roughly a four per cent a year incline as it is there is little wiggle room for Council to spend more on infrastructure upgrades without looking at some major spending cuts elsewhere and that is a discussion there seems little appetite for.
However, the Calgary situation has to have put communities across the country on high alert to just what might happened any day to any one of them.
And the more old pipe a community has the greater the risk would seem to be.
