Sprawlcast is Calgary’s in-depth municipal podcast. Made in collaboration with CJSW 90.9 FM, it’s a show for curious Calgarians who want more than the daily news grind.

A lightly-edited transcript of this episode is below, for those who would rather read than listen. Subscribe to Sprawlcast on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts so you get new episodes as soon as they drop.

If you value in-depth Calgary journalism, support The Sprawl so we can do more stories like this one!

COUNCILLOR KOURTNEY PENNER: I just want to acknowledge that there is disappointment in the decision that we've made today.

JEFF BINKS: It has been 10 years of design, debates and delays when it comes to building the Green Line.

MAYOR JYOTI GONDEK: More than 300,000 people have moved here and we have not expanded our LRT system by one metre.

COUNCILLOR GIAN-CARLO CARRA: And the reality is that if we don't do this now, with the money that we have committed, we will never connect the north with the south.

KLASZUS: On June 5, this happened.

HEATHER YOUREX-WEST (GLOBAL NEWS): A massive water main break Wednesday night, flooding parts of the Trans-Canada Highway.

TARA NELSON (CTV NEWS): That 78-inch concrete pipe—so imagine, that that's more than six feet wide—burst around 6:30 p.m.

YOUREX-WEST: By morning, the full extent of the break’s impact became clear.

NANCY MACKAY (CITY OF CALGARY): The break is on one of our critical pipes. It's called a feeder main, and it enables us to move water across the city.

KLASZUS: Outdoor watering was banned and indoor water restrictions were in place for nearly a month as the pipe was repaired. And on July 2, Mayor Jyoti Gondek made a long-awaited announcement.

GONDEK: I'm incredibly pleased to share that indoor water use can now return to normal.

KLASZUS: But what is normal? When it comes to water in Calgary, norms have changed over the years. Both in the city’s water supply and Calgarians’ use of that water.

KLASZUS: Scientists have been warning about the vulnerability of the city’s water supply for decades, but it’s not something most of us have given much thought to in our day-to-day lives until recently.

KERRY BLACK: I think because you don’t have to. I think because you can turn on your tap and you don’t have to see where it’s coming from and you don’t have to struggle with it at any point—that’s why you don’t have to think about it.

KLASZUS: This is Kerry Black, an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in the University of Calgary’s civil engineering department. The focus of her research is water.

BLACK: We have it so easy that you don’t even have a second thought about where it’s coming from until that flow is interrupted or, like what we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks, you’re asked to use less. And then you starting going, well, how did I not know about this before?

KLASZUS: In this episode, we’re going to zoom out from the feeder main that broke. We’re going to look at the realities of Calgary’s water supply. And we’re going to follow a drop of water from the Rocky Mountains west of Calgary to the taps in our homes.

KLASZUS: In 2022, Calgary city council approved a new climate strategy. And that year, council members heard from Blackfoot scholar and elder Leroy Little Bear, of the Kainai Nation, on the subject of climate change.

LEROY LITTLE BEAR: Existence is a web of relationships. What you do to the land, to the animals, to the water, you do to yourself.

KLASZUS: It’s interesting to consider Little Bear’s words in the context of Calgary, or what the Blackfoot call Mohkinstsis. A city that built its economy and identity on fossil fuel extraction is now grappling with the consequences of human-caused climate change. Calgary is bracing for too much water, in the form of floods—and not enough, in the form of drought.

In 2006, University of Alberta water scientist David Schindler warned that water scarcity would be one the most important 21st-century issues in the western prairie provinces. And he said that for a water expert, like he was, “looking ahead is like the view from a locomotive, 10 seconds before the train wreck.”

More recently, the City of Calgary has identified eight main climate hazards including extreme heat, drought, floods, severe storms and heavy rainfall.

FRANK FRIGO: This is part of the nature of the city of Calgary itself.

KLASZUS: This is Frank Frigo, a water engineer, hydrologist and manager in the city’s climate and environment department.

FRIGO: If you look to the west, you see the mountains; if you look to the east, you see the prairies. It is a place of economic extremes. It is a place also of hydrologic extremes. And so we sit on a very sharp fulcrum where we tend to have not enough water or too much. And that has always been part of the complexity of the hydrologic and water resources management game in our region—is that things are very tipsy.

KLASZUS: You could say it’s boom and bust.

FRIGO: It doesn’t rain every single day like it does in Vancouver. We don’t get 800 millimetres of precipitation like they do in southern Ontario. We get 450, and in some years we get 900, in some years we get 250. Often hydrologists talk about the averages in our region as being an aberration. It’s much more bimodal, where our system tends toward either wet or dry cycles.

KLASZUS: So let’s imagine a drop of water. It starts in the Rocky Mountains west of Calgary. And that drop of water will reach the city by one of two ways: the Bow River or the Elbow River. Today, more than two thirds of Calgary’s water supply comes from the Bow, and a third from the Elbow—but that wasn’t always the case.

FRIGO: Our system has developed historically, and at one point, much of our water supply actually came from the Elbow River. So back into the 1920s and 1930s, the Elbow River was used pretty extensively. In a modern context, we have water treatment plants on both rivers. And it's entirely true that the Bow River is the larger basin. It is the six times larger basin.

KLASZUS: Some of Calgary’s water comes from the foothills and the prairies. But most of it comes from the mountains.

FRIGO: The Elbow is much more of a front-range type of catchment. In the Elbow, there really is only the Rae Glacier and a couple of other high snow fields that contribute. So, the Elbow, we do see that reduction in flows in the late summer more succinctly than you do see it in the Bow.

In the Bow, all the way up to Bow Summit, all the glaciers that exist on the higher terrain—particularly at the Continental Divide, so around Lake Louise and north of Lake Louise—all of that is coming down through and ultimately draining to the Bow.

So here at the city of Calgary, the Bow River drains almost 9,000 square kilometres of total terrain. And of that, more than two-thirds of it is alpine terrain.

KLASZUS: You might imagine our drop of water starting from a mountain glacier. But while some of our water comes from glaciers, which are receding due to climate change, it’s not as much as you might think.

FRIGO: In a typical context, so across the span of an entire year, glaciers and high snow fields, or what hydrologists call névé are typically only producing about 3% of the total annual budget.

KLASZUS: But when glaciers and high snowfields are providing that water for Calgary is increasingly crucial.

FRIGO: In northern climates, we tend to think we’re very snow-dominated. But that’s because the precipitation that falls stays around for a long time, and we get to see its beautiful white presence for about six months. But a lot of our water budget actually occurs in those spring periods. Over 50% of the precipitation we receive annually in Calgary occurs in just three months—May, June and July.

KLASZUS: That changes, of course, as summer wears on. By late August and September, it’s hotter and drier.

FRIGO: That snow component is very important, and glaciers become increasingly important, when we’re in drought. So when that precipitation isn’t there and we’re not having run-off from frequent rainfall events, that high alpine snow and glacier contribution can become multiple tens of the total percent, up to almost 50%, of the total flow.

FRIGO: The other really important shift we're seeing is a shift in seasonality. So interestingly, for the Bow and the Elbow River basins, most of the global circulation models with climate change forcings in them do suggest that we’ll see more precipitation. But that precipitation is going to occur further away from when peak demands are in time.

KLASZUS: In other words, more rain and snow, but not when we’ll need it most.

FRIGO: We’re likely to see more precipitation in the winter, earlier alpine melt, earlier plains melt—but that means that that late summer period with more increased hot days is likely to be more vulnerable.

This puts increasing emphasis or increasing importance on appropriate management of water in existing reservoirs. And it certainly has led the City of Calgary and other water users to think more about the construction of additional reservoir storage, to be able to manage what is likely to become a more seasonally separated peak flow time from peak demand time.

KLASZUS: The province is building a Springbank “dry reservoir” west of Calgary that can temporarily store water when a flood happens. And the province is looking to build an additional reservoir west of Calgary in the coming years—not a “dry reservoir” like Springbank’s, but one that can also store water. Basically giving more options for Calgary’s water supply as the impacts of climate change take hold.

KLASZUS: So our drop of water comes down from the mountains. It flows down the river. And it reaches Calgary, entering the city’s water treatment system via one of three raw water intakes.

Here’s Pam Duncan, team lead of environmental strategies in the city’s climate and environment department.

PAM DUNCAN: If you're at Bowness Park, if you look across the river, you can see one of our raw water intakes just across from that park.

KLASZUS: But it’s not as simple as just taking large amounts of water out of the river. You need a license to do that. And water licenses in Alberta are a hot issue right now. They’re governed through a system called “first in time, first in right,” an arrangement that’s been in place since 1894. Here’s U of C engineering professor Kerry Black.

BLACK: It’s not what you would think it is, because “first in time” would lend itself to the notion and idea that Indigenous people were here first, and so they would have a first in right to water. That’s not how it works though. First in time, first in right is anybody who was present at a certain period of time had access to water licenses. And anybody who came after that only had access to more junior licenses based on the amount of water available.

And so, if you’re on a junior license—or depending on the kind of water license you have, during times of drought or restrictions—you’re the first to be removed from having water rights. For example, there are many Indigenous communities in Alberta who are on junior licenses, so during times of drought they would have their water rights removed, which is a pretty problematic issue.

KLASZUS: Alberta has some 25,000 water licensees. Agriculture and irrigation account for almost half of the water allocations in the province.

DUNCAN: What’s unique about southern Alberta, and the Bow River watershed where Calgary is, is that the basin is fully allocated. That means that there are no new licenses available. So if you need another license, you have to get one or transfer one or obtain one from an existing user who has a license.

KLASZUS: In the mid-2000s, the province put a moratorium on new water licenses in much of Southern Alberta, creating a market-based system for water. This is a particular challenge for smaller municipalities like Cochrane and Okotoks, which have faced limits on future population growth due to the limits of their water licenses. But it’s also an issue for Calgary.

Calgary got its main water licenses in the 1970s and 1980s. But as a growing population puts more pressure on our water supply, the limits of our licenses have been identified as a significant risk for the city’s long-term future when it comes to water security.

DUNCAN: Overall, our licenses are fairly senior when it comes to sort of other municipal licenses across Alberta. But when you look sort of broadly at all licenses, especially the bigger, older energy and agriculture licenses, we are more junior—so, relatively in the middle of the pack in terms of seniority.

KLASZUS: To prepare for potential water shortages, the Alberta government announced voluntary water sharing agreements in April. These are between 38 water licensees in Southern Alberta, including municipalities such as Calgary, Lethbridge and Medicine Hat, along with irrigation districts and industry. These agreements aren’t legally binding, but the license holders have agreed to use less water in drought conditions—between 5 and 10% less, in the case of municipalities. Here’s Alberta Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz in April.

REBECCA SCHULZ: This is a reminder for all Albertans, no matter where you live in the province, to be mindful of your own water use. So whether that be in your home, outside your home, or if you're a business owner, an industrial user—think about how you can use water more wisely. Because every drop you can conserve can be used by somebody downstream.

KLASZUS: Across the political spectrum, there’s a recognition that the first in time, first in right system—or FITFIR—won’t serve Alberta’s future if left as is.

BLACK: The FITFIR, first in time, first in right system is something that I think a lot of people on all sides of the floor have been saying needs to shift and change. But it is very hard to sort of tear something up and start again. But I think they are looking at water allocations differently, and trying to have some different conversations about how we manage it, because they recognize that this is not a system that works anymore. Maybe it never did, but it’s definitely an archaic system that doesn’t prioritize water use where we need it most.

KLASZUS: So our drop of water comes down from the Rocky Mountains. It’s removed from the river under a water license. And from there, it enters a water treatment plant, where that raw water is chlorinated and filtered.

FRIGO: The Bearspaw Treatment Plant on the Bow River and the Glenmore Treatment Plant at Glenmore Reservoir on the Elbow River supply two-thirds and one-third, respectively, of the typical demands throughout the city.

But then this water is pumped through a very complex system of thousands of kilometres of pipe in seven different pressure zones. And these pressure zones are managed to be able to ensure—and they all have reservoir storage so that if something happens, there’s storage for fire flow and emergency conditions.

And then, all of this is balanced by a very complex system that includes a SCADA network—so, a data acquisition system—that understands what we’re going to see in the way of demands and levels. And that means also balancing water quality and the duration of time that water is within our system.

Our city is covering over 850 square kilometres, and so there’s a lot of pipe, and ensuring that that water is moving around and getting everywhere it needs to at the pressures it needs to is in itself a complex science.

KLASZUS: Calgary has more than 5,000 kilometres of pipe. And as all Calgarians know by now, these pipes are aging—and sometimes they break. Even the big ones.

BLACK: Canadian pipes are old; North American pipes are old. They’ve been around for a really long time. They’re not always given enough resources in order to inspect and maintain, and that’s a problem. The longer you leave them unmaintained, the bigger the issue you’re going to have arising.

KLASZUS: And what happened in Calgary in June is likely just the beginning.

BLACK: It certainly should be expected in some way, shape or form, that our pipes are just getting older, and we should expect levels of failure to continue to uptick. Because we’re getting to a point where we have a lot of pipes installed at around the same time, meaning we’re going to have more and more issues arise—and we won’t be able to sort of schedule them out, and make sense of that from an economic perspective.

KLASZUS: As our drop makes its way through Calgary’s pipes, it may or may not make it to your tap, because of leakage. And leakage is normal in municipal water systems. Calgary loses somewhere in the realm of 20% of its treated water through leakage—but this isn’t entirely unusual.

BLACK: Everyone compares this to oil and gas. In an oil and gas leak, you’d have a response right away. You’d be monitoring the health and safety of the pipe. When oil leaks into the environment, it’s kind of a big deal. But when water leaks into it, no one necessarily thinks of that as a bad thing, because it’s just going back into the environment. So there’s not as much of a concern around leaky pipes, but we definitely have leaky pipes. And it’s a hard thing to estimate. These are all estimates, if it’s 20%, whatever, those are estimates of how much you’re losing in the system.

Across Canada, we're probably looking anywhere from 5%, 10% leakage to some communities having upwards of 50%, 60%. It really varies, and certainly if you spend more time operating and maintaining and inspecting your pipes then you're able to stay on top of that. But it's something that we accept. There's a certain amount of of water leakage within a distribution system that you are okay with, and sometimes, depending on the city, 20%, 30%, 40% they might be okay with.

KLASZUS: A ruptured feeder main, like Calgary’s, is on another scale entirely. And it’s fascinating to hear people try and make sense of it.

For example, I’ve heard people who are against blanket rezoning say the feeder main break proves that our infrastructure can’t handle more inner-city densification. And I’ve heard anti-sprawl advocates say it proves we can’t keep building outward.

And I asked Kerry Black at the U of C about this.

BLACK: I don’t think it proves either one of those things. First of all, with infrastructure, you’re usually restricted by decisions that were made in the past. And how someone feels about how a city should develop post-war, or during the ‘70s and ‘80s, it’s very different than what someone thinks right now and what we know now. So it’s easy to go back and say, oh, we should have done this or should have done that, but that’s the easiest job in the world. The hardest job is to figure out, okay, what do we do now?

The reality is if we want to grow more dense in the city, we’re still going to have to make some adjustments to our pipe network. With the sprawl, we are still putting pressure on our infrastructure network. More people when it comes to infrastructure is just more stress, no matter where they’re located.

But I think our focus should probably be shifted to how much water we’re actually using. And so, more people using more water, that’s a problem. More people using less water—less of a problem.

KLASZUS: And that brings us to the next stage on the journey of our water drop: the taps in your home, and how you use your water.

Calgarians have been notorious water wasters over the years. If you go back fifty years, we used copious amounts of potable water—more than most North American cities. Calgarians were using about 775 litres a day in the late 1970s. And long after many cities adopted water metering, where you pay for how much water you use, Calgarians fought against it, because they wanted to stick with a flat fee for water.

This went to a plebiscite multiple times over the years, starting in the 1950s. And each time, Calgarians overwhelmingly voted it down. Water metering was introduced gradually and most Calgarians were still on a flat rate for water in the mid-’90s. It took until 2014 for all single-family homes in Calgary to be on water meters.

KLASZUS: And even now, Calgarians don’t really feel the bite of water wastage. Just like we want our property taxes to stay low, we want water rates to stay low—and they have. But Black says that’s something that will likely change.

BLACK: There's no incentive to change behaviour right now. There's no incentive because I can go home, I can turn on the tap and I could leave it on for the next 24 hours, and no one's coming to the door. So they might send me a note going, I think you have a leak, but no one's coming to your door to say, hey, you can't do this—and that's a problem. And what you pay for that is not that big of a deal, so it's not going to impact you.

If I paid more for it, if I had water restrictions, if there was more education about our water and how we get it and why it's important—there's still a lot of misconceptions that water is renewable and we'll always have it. And that might have been the case at some point, but it's no longer the case.

KLASZUS: Over the years, the city’s waterworks department has pleaded with Calgarians to voluntarily use less water and water their lawns less. By the mid-2000s, with Calgary’s population surging past a million, city hall was warning that “it’s increasingly obvious that our city’s current water use is not sustainable.”

In 2003, Calgarians were using around 520 litres per capita, per day. It was hundreds of litres less than what was being used in the 1980s, but still a lot.

In the mid-2000s, city council approved a water efficiency plan. One of its goals was to reduce that water use to 350 litres per capita, per day by 2033. And we’ve already hit that target, thanks in part to water efficiency efforts like a low-flush toilet rebate program that city hall ran for many years.

But all of these numbers include industrial and commercial uses. If you look at just what you use at home, Calgarians use about 170 litres per capita, per day.

And most of it goes back into the river via the city’s wastewater treatment system—between 80% and 90% of it. But there’s still a cost to using all that water. Here’s City of Calgary hydrologist Frank Frigo speaking to council in January.

FRIGO: Even though that use is returned to the environment, so there’s not a loss to the environment, we still have to treat it, pump it, store it, and all of those components on top of the additional outdoor demand means that our system is more stressed. It also means that our system has to be sized larger, so the infrastructure costs both at the plants and in the distribution system are higher when that cumulative demand is higher.

KLASZUS: Then there’s the remaining 10% or 20% that doesn’t return to the river. Here’s Nicole Newton, the city’s manager of natural environment and adaptation, explaining that portion to council.

NEWTON: So primarily that consumptive use would be mostly for outdoor water use, or consumptive use through like industrial businesses, such as a beverage manufacturer—use that’s not returned to the river.

KLASZUS: Coca-Cola uses Calgary water for its Dasani bottled water and other beverages. Coke’s bottling plant is in northeast Calgary, just off Barlow Trail. And I asked Pam Duncan about this in March.

KLASZUS TO DUNCAN: Coca-Cola, for example, bottles our tap water. So can the city control what happens to its water in a situation like that? If we’re in a drought, can we say, this isn’t an appropriate use anymore, or this amount of use is appropriate?

DUNCAN: Well at this point, our focus in a drought is outdoor water use. That’s really where we can make the difference because that is overall the largest consumptive use when we’re talking about water use in the city. And especially during shortages, we want to see that reduced. That’s something we can enforce through a bylaw, and that’s what we’re working to reduce this year if we do enter into drought conditions.

In terms of that sort of industrial use, we’re working with our water services partners here at the city to work with businesses to find efficiencies. They know their businesses best, but we’re always encouraging finding those water efficiencies. It saves them money as well.

KLASZUS: I reached out to Coke to ask how they reduced water usage during the water restrictions in June. Company spokesperson Nicola Krishna said Coke “deployed a rapid response water conservation protocol” in response to the restrictions. And that this included adjusting production schedules to minimize water use. I also asked how much water Coke's Calgary plant typically uses for bottled water, but did not get an answer to that question.

Car washes in Calgary also use a lot of water—and it’s been regular practice for private lake communities in Calgary to use potable water to top up their lakes.

FRIGO: In many cases, there's a combination of stormwater and potable water that's used, but some of them do use potable water.

KLASZUS: But in April, city hall announced this would no longer be allowed after May if outdoor water restrictions were in effect.

KLASZUS: To this day, city hall is still trying to get Calgarians to use less water. And I’m not talking about the water main break. Even before that, city hall was going to introduce an outdoor watering schedule this year—two days a week max, for six hours total, and only between 8 p.m. and 10 a.m., rather than the heat of the day.

The idea was to eventually make this permanent. But in June, council deferred this to early 2025 at city admin’s advice, because of the water main break and the subsequent outdoor restrictions. Admin says it wants to incorporate what it learns from this situation into whatever plan is made.

KLASZUS: I asked Black—when it comes to the pressures on our rivers and water supply, how important are business users compared with residential users?

BLACK: Honestly, they’re more important. And certainly the focus of the last little bit has been on individual water use. But that’s only one small puzzle piece. The amount that we use for industry/commercial purposes is massive. Even recreational. We have to start thinking about: Is this a good use of clean potable water? Can I use/reuse in some way? Can I be forcing industries to invest in more expensive technologies, but where they can reuse water onsite and so reduce the demand on potable water.

The reality is, we don’t have that incentive right now for them to do so, but they are huge water wasters. And we’ve been warning for decades about water privatization and shifting to models that we’re seeing internationally that we know can be harmful.

I don’t know if everyone’s onside to have some tough conversations, but the optics in Canada is, we have a lot of water, so we don’t have to worry about it. And now that we’re talking about drought and climate change and all of these things that are impacting our water sources, there are more people wanting to talk about it, but we’re still not there yet. I don’t think we’ve hit the tipping point of people wanting to have that conversation. But business, commercial, industry—huge, huge role to play; so does food production, and then you’ve got to balance that.

So there are a lot of different demands on our watersheds, and we have to get to a place where we can have some honest conversations about who needs what, where, and what the priorities are for water.

KLASZUS: In Calgary, we’ve largely understood water restrictions to be an aberration, something to endure before we get back to normal and can use as much water as we please.

But there’s no avoiding it: normal is changing.

BLACK: A lot of other jurisdictions, water restrictions are normal. Outdoor water use restrictions in the summer is a normal thing in most parts of B.C., some parts of other provinces. Water restrictions for certain businesses, not uncommon. There was a bottled water moratorium in Ontario—there are different ways of approaching it. You can pause on things until you figure it out. But I think no matter what you’re looking at, we’re headed on a path of water use restrictions across, not just individual, but business and industrial purposes. I think that’s just a reality.

Jeremy Klaszus is editor-in-chief of The Sprawl.