Water rant, revisited

Here we are again, under water restrictions. That's not news if you live in Calgary or nearby, but might be for some of my readers. We spent a good part of the summer of 2024 under water restrictions because a large water main burst. I blogged about it here, if you want to remind yourself. I'm going to go in a different direction this time. 

Sometimes it's interesting to look at a timeline of events. The pipe was installed in 1975, and it's safe to say that planning and procurement started several years before that. The pipe was a fairly new innovation of steel, concrete, and wire, and was supposed to last 100 years.

For reference here's the list of mayors since 1970 according to Wikipedia.

30	Rod Sykes	October 22, 1969	October 31, 1977	8 years, 9 days
31	Ross Alger	October 31, 1977	October 27, 1980	2 years, 362 days
32	Ralph Klein[c]	October 27, 1980	March 21, 1989	8 years, 145 days
33	Don Hartman	March 21, 1989	October 23, 1989	216 days
34	Al Duerr	October 23, 1989	October 22, 2001	11 years, 364 days
35	Dave Bronconnier	October 22, 2001	October 25, 2010	9 years, 3 days
36	Naheed Nenshi	October 25, 2010	October 26, 2021	11 years, 1 day
37	Jyoti Gondek	October 26, 2021	October 29, 2025	4 years, 3 days
38	Jeromy Farkas	October 29, 2025	Present	63 days (as of December 31, 2025)

The little c beside Ralph Klein means he resigned to become premier and Don Hartman was appointed to take his place till the next election.

Some of the comments in the news media are a perfect illustration of why one shouldn't read the unmoderated comments. My fear is that these ARE the moderated comments. They pretty much uniformly blame Nenshi and Gondek for the failures. Premier Smith is in the news blaming Nenshi, and suggesting that provincial oversight is needed for municipal water infrastructure.

Let's think about all this and try to do so in an orderly fashion. 

Taxpayers are always screaming about tax increases, so the City is really sensitive around how much money it spends. Yes, I know, the nay sayers say the way Calgary spends makes drunken sailors look like models of restraint. And yes, some of their spending decisions look dumb. But generally if there's two options, the City will choose the cheapest one. 

Sometimes they will spend more at the time, thinking it will save money on future expansion plans. One example of that was building an LRT junction under City Hall, thinking they would eventually run the LRT underground in a future expansion, and golly, wouldn't having an LRT station right inside be cool? 

Except that underground line will never happen and for a while the homeless took it over till it was fenced up. You used to be able to see where it was, with a section of fence blocking access from the LRT tracks, but I haven't ridden the LRT in at least 5 years, so I've no idea what it looks like now. There is access from within City Hall so it's probably used for materials storage now.

When the water main was installed back in the day, I'm sure there were expansion plans to build out the network as the city grew, or plan for potential breaks. Except, that 100 year lifespan. Some engineer was probably worried about a single failure point due to some unlikely event, and covered his ass in an obscure report. But anyone doing a risk based assessment in the 80's would have ranked the risk quite low. Failures began within 15 to 20 years of installation due to a thinner gage of wire being used. (here) 

So really, some of the first indications there might be a problem would have started surfacing about the very late 80's at earliest, and maybe not till into the 90's. (Don't forget, everything was rosy in Calgary after the 88 Winter Olympics.) I'd like to believe that about the time Duerr got elected some engineer was watching the literature and realized the failures were of the same kind of pipe Calgary installed. Who knows what they did with that information? There's probably a report, and the person who buried it probably went back and made sure the burial was permanent. Or maybe it was discussed in an engineering committee meeting, dismissed, and buried. Maybe they proposed spending some money on testing, and was denied.

As a digression, Duerr was known as the do nothing mayor. He didn't want to spend money on infrastructure because he wanted to keep tax increases small. Meanwhile, Calgary's population was exploding. Calgary passed 1 million population about 2006 or 2007. The wastewater plant manual I was reading in the mid-80's from 70's era material projected Calgary would reach that milestone in 2025. Everybody needs clean drinking water, and wants their poop to go away. Both those technologies get expensive, especially wastewater.

Bronconnier (known as Bronco by several columnists) vowed to catch up, and by golly he loved to build roads and LRT and various climate related initiatives. He wanted visibility. I'm pretty sure an underground pipe was not on his radar. Life went on.

Now it's 2010 and the pipe has been in the ground 35 years out of a projected 100 year lifespan. There are reports documenting the failures in other municipalities, and there are almost certainly reports documenting the testing that was done on that pipe and other parts of the network. There has been an ongoing program of updating water mains, so it's safe to assume the reports indicate problem locations, and they went onto a priority list limited by budget constraints. 

That no work was done on the big water main indicates a couple things to me. Either the testing didn't find existing problems, or it did and the repairs didn't happen for some reason. It's entirely possible that one set of tests say things are good, and another that there's a problem, with the solution being to do more testing, or bring in a consulting specialist.

People think testing is easy. It's not. There are thousands of Km of water piping in Calgary and hundreds of thousands of connections to that piping. There is altogether too much leakage, and the City is trying to address the problem, and fixing it will cost money.

There is no one magic test to find a problem, or declare there isn't a problem, and all testing costs money. The bigger the pipe, the more area there is to fail. Different kinds of pipe need different kinds of tests. Composite materials are difficult in many ways. Interpreting the results and planning followup actions requires specific engineering competence to choose the right risk assessment methodologies.

The 2024 failure appears to be related to the wrapping wires snapping, which makes noise which can be detected. Acoustic testing became a thing somewhere around 2000, but I don't know when Calgary started doing it. In any case, until you get a failure it's hard to document exactly how well a test is working. After all, a test with a result of no indications of failure could mean there are no indications of failure, or that the test is faulty in some way, or is being done in the wrong location.

The current failure did not have audible wire snaps, so it appears to be a different failure mechanism. The photo I saw looked like someone had sliced the pipe open across the wires. One of the inspection methods in oil and gas is to dig a hole to the pipeline and inspect it, which creates the risk of striking the pipeline with an excavator shovel. Even then, all you really know is that one section of pipe is good. The presumption is is that with the same materials, the same soil conditions, and the same product in the pipe, that the corrosion will be similar. Those are not always valid assumptions.

While fixing the 2024 failure they found several other sections of the main that needed urgent repairs. But there is a lot of that kind of pipe in the ground, and with this many failures it's an easy assumption that there are other sections that are ready to fail, which explains the replacement program. I don't know if the specific 2025 failure area was tested, and if so, was identified as a risk or not. Some junior engineer is probably reviewing reports looking for that exact information.

Should the City have started a program back in the day to twin that water main, or to install additional mains to increase supply flexibility? That's an easy thing to say now. It's a much harder argument to make before the main fails. Be honest, even if administration had proposed to Council they authorize tens of millions of dollars on water main upgrades in 2010, what's the odds of it passing? That's an easy place to cut or defer costs. After all, the main is only one third into it's projected life and everybody is getting water out of their taps, except for some rare occasions during low river flow, or the smaller water main breaks that happen periodically. It would read like the City is installing unneeded redundancy and feathering their nest. And don't forget, there was a huge hailstorm in Calgary in 2010, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. And then the floods of 2013 thoroughly distracted everyone from water main issues. There's always something happening, and an underground pipe is easy to ignore.

Towards the end of his term in office Nenshi had become an unpopular mayor, and Gondek was never popular. Neither had the political capital to push for an invisible water main project. Some councillors would have voted against anything they proposed, just on principle.

Premier Smith is talking provincial oversight, but that's just politics, trying to score cheap points. They are the least competent government in Alberta history. There is no reason to suspect they would be any better at oversight than Calgary, and have much less skin in the game. In fact, it's to their advantage to make Calgary and other municipal politicians look bad, so they look good in comparison, and distract the attention on their own flaws. Nobody should trust anything they say on any topic.

The City has already started working to twin the line, and promise to expedite it even more, if that's possible. It could take a couple of years, but that doesn't really solve the problem. They don't end up with twice the capacity or flexibility because the old line is unreliable. It should be taken out of service because another rupture could cause catastrophic damage to roads, bridges, buildings, or other infrastructure. We are then in the same position as before, with a single point of failure. 

The oil and gas industry usually abandons pipelines in place. There's a process, though I can't remember the details now. I suspect abandoning this water main that way is not an option. The concrete will continue to corrode even in a dry condition, and failure could cause a sinkhole under the Bow River, or any of several major roads, or disrupt rail traffic. Just imagine them capping the line at each end, maybe closing all the isolation valves along the way, then getting a failure under the Bow River. Nobody would notice. Eventually the water would start coming out somewhere else from what everyone thought was a dry pipe.

The next step should be to remove the old pipe and install a new one there, which will probably mean significant disruption to nearby homes, businesses, and both road and rail traffic. And cost lots of money, let's not forget that.

But then isn't supplying clean drinking water to residents one of the primary things a city is supposed to do? I'm not sure what comes higher on the priority list.

The view out my window.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (NB)

Film

Linda

Newfoundland

New Brunswick

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago

Flower

Landscape

Dino related

Image of the 2025

The first Image of the Year blog post was January 2018, so this is the 9th edition, if I've counted correctly. I've blogged about what goes into selecting the images that go on the yearly podium, but I don't propose to revisit all that here and now. I figure the interested can go back and find the posts easily enough. 

I still think the IotM and IotY are a good idea as long as I'm trying to become a better photographer, and thus will continue. Plus it sometimes sparks comments from my readers about their agreement (or not) with my choices. Plus plus, from a blogging perspective, it gives me 10% of the blog post production goal right there. Yes, I'm going to aim for 10 a month in 2026. 

As it turns out, I took fewer photos in 2025 than in any year since started using a real camera. Lots fewer. I'm not entirely sure why, but suspect that even when I took one of the cameras for a walk, I was a lot more picky about what made me click the shutter. I know I'm much more picky about what images get edited at all, and what gets a 4 or 5 star rating. Those have become more rare over the years. 

In one sense it's quite straightforward to capture a focussed, reasonably well exposed image of something. But is it an interesting something? I'd like to think my photography is getting better at producing interesting images, but also that my standards are getting higher.

It's a complicated world. In one sense creative people should only put their very best work out in the world. Yet, recognizing the best is difficult, and other people disagree. Part of learning how to do their best work, is to share work with other creative people, even if it isn't the best. Maybe it was the best you could do in those circumstances, and it's a learning experience to have someone else make suggestions. 

Another part is the whole social media "thing". I don't even know what to call it anymore. There are a huge number of creative (loosely defined and YMMV) people trying to capture eyeballs by putting out a near infinity of still images, video, text, and other art forms. In addition there are the AI bots and trolls flooding the zone with shit. Does an artist put out a steady stream of pretty good stuff with the occasional real winner, and (hopefully) maintain the attention of their audience, or put out an excellent work once in a while, only to find their audience isn't there anymore?

I don't have any real way of knowing how many images appear in my blog over a year. In 2025 there were 139 posts, which is more than the previous couple years, about the same as a couple years before that, and way less than before that. The main section might have only one photo, but there's usually several that I hope are topical, or (rarely) more than 20. The Of the Day section started off with 8 in January, and ended up with 11. If I wave my thumb in the breeze and assume an average of a dozen images per post, that works out to 1,668 images over the year, or 15 per post is 2,085 images. That's actually a lot of images, and if you've slogged through all of them, congratulations. Thank you for reading.

Were they all 'the best?' Certainly not, though I think they're all pretty good.  Well, mostly. A few I look back on and wonder what I was thinking. Best comes down to about a dozen, or two dozen at most images. I'm pretty sure that there's only a few that get lingered over or returned to, and it's something different for different people. I'm also pretty sure that some get scrolled past as you wonder why I'm still on about a topic. Maybe I'll revisit the whole Of the Day idea.

Oddly enough, much as I've gone on about dithering about the choice in previous years, this year I got from the first cut of 28 down to the final dozen quite quickly. There are several near repeats, like similar images of the same waterfall. Knowing I'll only pick one of those narrows the decision down to about 6 images, which is where I am just now, with the serious dithering starting.

Actually, the main dither for a couple weeks now is trying to define a self-assigned photo project for 2026. I'd like to expose a roll of film a week, aiming to end up with about 400 or so photos. The idea is to print at least some of these in the darkroom, and maybe produce a book of the best of said photos. As I commented to a buddy, I want the project to be detailed enough so I know what to go look for, but not so detailed it’s a straightjacket, and not so loose as my usual photo life of wandering around taking photos of whatever catches my eye. Here it is Jan 1, and I still have not achieved clarity. Well, later in the day I did, sort of. It's foggy out. More later.

I've also been dithering about books. Now I can start working on a 2025 book of photos because now I know which ones they are.  I'll probably work on it in January and hit the print button when there's a good Blurb sale. The harder one is New Brunswick. Still dithering, trying to figure it out.

I can hear you saying to yourselves, get on with it. Here's the final 12.

It took a while to get down to the final three, and I'm still not sure I've got them in the right order. Will you forgive me if I say it was a photo finish? What these three all have in common is that I knew they were going to be good when I clicked the shutter. I saw the image in my head, and worked to capture it while  hoping I wouldn't mess anything up or the scene wouldn't change somehow. That's one of the reasons to work through lots of images that aren't the best, so when you find or create the good ones, you have the required skills. 

I have come back to these images again and again throughout the year.

2nd Runner Up

One of the photos I had hoped to get in New Brunswick was calm water reflecting trees in full colour. Yes, I know it's a bit of a cliche. On our last full day, we were crossing the one lane bridge in Shediac Bridge. I was paying attention to the road, and Linda exclaimed "look how calm the water is!" That was a first during our visit. I pulled into the parking lot for the busy lunch place, and walked back out on the one lane bridge that does not have a separate pedestrian walkway. I got some nice photos of the reflection of the trees looking one way, but when I turned around I nearly swooned as I saw this. A couple of clicks later I hustled off the bridge to avoid a truck.

1st Runner Up

From a walk in Carburn Park on a bitterly cold day. I'd stopped on the way home just to see if there was anything interesting happening along the river, even though I wasn't really dressed for the weather. On the way back I saw this, and was instantly captivated. I didn't see the image for nearly a week till I got a chance to develop the film.

Image of the Year

I was driving back to the AirBnB from exploring a New Brunswick beach when I saw this. A second later I was on a bridge looking for a place to turn around. Did that, with another driver wondering what the heck I was doing, then made a dodgy left to get into a little boat launch. I got set up and worked the scene hard, trying different exposures and slightly different compositions. There was a guy eating his lunch nearby, watching me, but he didn't say anything.

December Image of the Month

Happy New Year to all my readers!

I decided to go with just two photos from December, both taken on the same ramble. More from that ramble here. Yes, I'm working on Image of the Year.

Runner up

Image of the Month

The last blog of 2025

I started writing this on the 27th, not knowing for sure if I'd do another one between now and the 31st. I still don't want to do a summary of the year, or a year end top 10 list of something.

In fact, just at this very moment, I don't quite know what I'm going to write, or what photos might be included, but I suppose that's nothing new. (Goes away to drink more coffee and give the demanding mammal a fuzzy blanket lap.)

It was one of these bags of coffee. They're all amazing!

Just lately I've revisited Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's been 50 years since it came out, and before that it was a stage show. I'd heard of it, but didn't see it till sometime late in 1980 when I went to a midnight showing at one of the local movie theatres. It was quite the experience with people singing along or shouting at the screen. 

At the time I was a repressed white boy kind of down on sub-cultures, and no real awareness of how sub some of the cultures could be. Then again, recall that one of my high school teachers thought, and said out loud, that anybody 'found in' during one of the bath house raids then taking place in Toronto in the 70's should be shot in the street.

I've seen it any number of times since, of course. Usually in a midnight showing, and that could be fun depending on the theatre and the crowd. The wildest was during a showing where the theatre was going to be closing down for renovations, and they said have at it. The quietest happened at a science fiction convention, of all places, during a late night showing. I started singing along to the opening, and was shushed. I made some of the standard responses, and was asked to leave. Several of the audience wanted to actually watch the movie as is, and were taking notes. Imagine that. We have the DVD. I sing along. Without shame. The cats hide.

What got me going on all this was one of those reaction videos. The Charismatic Voice reviewed the whole thing, and it was more fun watching her face than anything else. She had no idea what to expect and was somewhat shocked.

In one sense the reaction videos are fun, watching young people 'discover' things that are familiar to me and nearly anyone else my age. Sometimes they're interesting, in that they are picking out things I hadn't noticed. But some of them are hard to believe, like the young-ish (he appears) music producer (he says) that has never listened to The Beatles (he says with a straight face). How is that possible? Some rapper kid who has never heard of Pink Floyd I'll give you.

Some of that gets driven by current events, like Brian Wilson dying. People dive in and listen to work they might only have heard in passing, and suddenly appreciate that one of the great musical geniuses of all time has passed away.

Us boomers are going to get a lot of that over the coming years. Brigette Bardot died yesterday at age 91. There's a lot of people who remember her frolicking around wearing not much in various 1960's movies.  Mick Jagger seems to be going strong at 82, and the same for Paul McCartney (speaking of one of the other musical geniuses of our time.) Dick Van Dyke just passed 100, still doing his thing. I remember him from the Disney movies of my childhood. Good for them and all the other creative people out there still doing their thing, whether anyone is paying attention or not. Don't get me started about attention seeking, and brands, and chasing the algorithm.

I sometimes envision a map in my head, sort of like the famous Tube map for the London Underground. My time line is of course a nice straight line. Along side it for a while are the time lines for people active in my life, colour coded for different roles, such as family, work colleagues, friends might be different shades of colour depending on if they are triathlon, or SCA, or photography buddies. Most of these veer in from left field, track with me for a while, and veer off again. They, of course, would say theirs is the straight line, and I'm the one the veered in and out. Fair enough.

Every now and then I wonder what happened to all those people. I might miss news of someone because I'm not on Facebook much anymore, and Facebook screwing with the algorithm to determine who sees what has nothing to do with it, oh no. Some of them have died, I know that, including a kid in my home room class in grade 9 who barely got out of high school. Some people I knew have almost certainly died, and I might never know it. I understand why some people read the obit page first. I could die and them not know, which is almost a certainty given that I'm such a low profile person leading a low profile life.

So you knew I had to. The Herald obit includes a Dick Argatoff, 1951 to 2025. I'm pretty sure he was a contractor I interacted with during my time at Amoco. There are a few people listed that are younger than me, including a child, which I'm sure is heartbreaking for their family.

If you've been following along you probably heard I had an MRI done on Halloween, and shortly after got told I DIDN'T have cancer. Reassuring news, though that could change next year, or next decade. After all, everything causes cancer. As an aside, sometime next month I send the radon testing thingie and my toenail clippings in and sometime later I'll find out if our house has radon in it. Which it probably does, though the actual level of exposure is unknown. After living here for 40 years I kind of wonder if it's worth mitigating the exposure for whatever time we have left. I'm trying not to think about the reaction of field staff during a gas plant turnaround being told they had to wait for benzene testing before they could start some kinds of work. They were unconcerned, thinking it was all a make work project for the health and safety people.

So I've let this germinate a couple days and it's time to send it.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (NB)

Film

At least I didn't have to worry about dust spots on this one.

Linda

Newfoundland

New Brunswick

Finding this one took a bit of doing, with Mrs Google once again telling us what is the shorter path, but longer drive. Parking for it is kind of tricky, involving a hill and a blind corner. Good thing there wasn't much traffic.

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

Probably because I'm dying of envy at the people living there. Can you imagine?

I think this is somewhere on the Coromandel peninsula, maybe Hahei beach. 

90 days, or so ago

Inside the Miscou lighthouse.

Flower

Landscape

One of the main roads in New Zealand.

Dino related

Latest reading, with lots of references

The library books on hold arrived the morning of the 24, meaning I had to brave the traffic if I wanted something to read over the holidays. We aren't much for going to the mall, any mall, pretty well any time, and even more so in December. I was not surprised to see that South Center was a gong show, but there was hardly anyone in the library. I got in, found my books, saw another interesting one along the way and escaped.

So unlike a trip earlier in the week where I am quite prepared to say I spent more time sitting at red lights than I did driving. So much traffic.

Yes, it was minus WTF out then, and it still is now. Plus it's snowing more. And it's getting windy. 

Yes, we put up our tree on schedule. Two photos for you. Yes, Celina loves it, and lurks under there almost as much as she does apricating.

Art Work by Sally Mann.

For whatever reason I thought this would be a picture book, but it's not. It's so much better than that.  I'd read one of her other books, and cannot for the life of me remember which one. Nor can I find it in the library, so maybe it was a chapter about Sally Mann in another book.

In any case, this is great reading for someone just starting out in their career. Why? All the great advice. One of the great bits is, do the work. Keep doing it, and put only your best out in the world. That really resonates with me, since I was surrounded during much of my (so-called) career by people who couldn't or wouldn't do the work. I will cop to the accusation of putting less than my best out into the world, but the problem is that there is no general agreement on what is best. I look at earlier photos and wonder what I was thinking to take the photo, let alone publish it. And sometimes, the converse, finding an overlooked gem.

I told one summer student that if they wanted to get ahead of the majority of the job hunting crowd, all they had to do was reliably show up on time ready to work, and then do the work competently. At one time I had much advice about work life, but it is mercifully fading into a foggy haze. I blogged about it here, while it was still fairly fresh in mind. That is part 1 of a 5 part series, which I was told was amusing in places.

She was a prolific letter and journal writer and shares some of those. They're a fascinating insight into what's going on in her head during a very busy life. It tied back to a recent book, The Notebook, here. I've been doing a lot of writing in a notebook lately, trying to think about what I think of a particular project. No conclusions so far, except that big surprise, the initial concept is unworkable, and I'm unsure if the road from it to explore variations will bear any fruit.

It actually led me to another book, Borrowed Time by George Webber, (here), because that is a variation of what I was thinking about. That blog has several other books that are influencing my thoughts about a 2026 film project.

The Revenge of Analog by David Sax.

I thought I'd read this one before, but no. It's actually about 10 years old, catching just the beginning of the analog revival. It didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know. I checked out several of the situations mentioned and they're still around. 

I certainly think of myself as an analog kind of guy. I tried reading books on an iPad, and once on a borrowed Kindle, but I infinitely prefer paper books. For my own photography I prefer film, and black and white at that, over digital, though of course client work and some specific situations is digital, unless of course someone wants to pay me to shoot film, which nobody has done, and I don't expect anyone will. 

I prefer older cars that don't 'help' me drive, and I'd love to get a new 1984 Accord hatchback, just as it was made then. No infotainment screen. Although I will admit that having the map on a screen is handy when driving in some place you don't know, though I've never understood the vagaries of why the system behaves different ways at different times, which annoys the heck out of me. 

I don't much listen to music any more, and when I do it's through a computer, and yes I know the music snobs are looking down their nose at me because of course a wax record on a turntable played through a tube amplifier is better. Except with my hearing I can't hear the subtle stuff anyways. The hearing aids are good, but not that good. Even with my poor hearing, autotune grates.

 

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (NB)

Film

Linda

After we finally got there. It was quite the adventure. 

Newfoundland

New Brunswick

Part of the view from Miscou Lighthouse 

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

This is one of the ones I worked on during my Lightroom upgrade last month.

90 days, or so ago

Flower

Landscape

Dino related