Bowness residents demand more information about main line repairs

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Christina Pilarski was camping in Kananaskis when she learned that the saga surrounding the town’s repaired main was not over and that another repair of the damaged main was likely to take place outside her home in Bowness.

Her phone was shaking with messages from her neighbors in a group chat as they shared information about the upcoming repairs. In less than three weeks, city workers would descend on her neighborhood and start tearing up the streets.

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The mood turned to fear as Pilarski and her neighbors anticipated a repeat of the recent major inconvenience that had come in the form of an emergency and made national headlines. But what irked them most was the lack of clarity, although Mayor Jyoti Gondek stressed that the city’s desire for better communication this time around was her own.

“We were not as quick to get the information out to the public as we should have been, and I promised you that we would get better at that,” Gondek said at a press conference on Friday.

The city said it found 16 “weak spots” along the main line, similar to the five “hotspots” that delayed the line’s restoration into July. Most of the repairs, scheduled to run 24 hours a day from Aug. 26 to Sept. 23, will be done along a stretch of 33rd Avenue NW and nearby Parkdale Boulevard. But the information is preliminary and subject to change, city General Manager Michael Thompson said.

The number of weak points and their exact locations have not yet been determined as the city is still trying to process the results of an analysis by a “high-tech” pipe diver – a tool that scans the 10.4-kilometer-long main supply line for anomalies.

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“Normally it would take months to get the pipe diver inspection data back, analyze it and develop a plan,” Thompson told reporters Friday.

“We evaluated this information within a matter of weeks and when we realized there were significant problems along 33rd Avenue, we immediately notified the people of Calgary – we are still in the process of completing the analysis of this information.”

Meanwhile, city officials went door-to-door throughout the week in various Bowness neighborhoods – including Pilarski’s, located on the corner of 33rd Avenue and 83rd Street – handing out letters informing people of the upcoming repairs.

A letter dated Aug. 7 stresses the urgency of the work. While the south supply line from Bearspaw is being repaired, the town must rely on the Glenmore Treatment Plant, which gets its water supply from the Elbow River. Water flow is heavier in the summer due to snowmelt and rainfall, and the town wants to repair the line so the reservoir can fill before its level drops in the winter.

The letter also explains what is expected of residents: they should comply with Level 4 restrictions and reduce their indoor water use by 25 percent. This is done by taking three-minute showers, avoiding washing up when possible and only washing full loads of laundry and dishes.

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But the letter lacks everything Pilarski wanted to know: How deep would they dig the roads in front of their houses? Will they be able to enter their houses if they don’t have access to the backyards? What will the noise level be? What will round-the-clock repairs look like?

With only two weeks left, residents are filling the gaps with speculation.

“We are all planning for the worst case scenario,” Pilarski said.

She is not alone in her opinion. Many Bowness residents share these concerns and have voiced their complaints to Ward 1 Councillor Sonya Sharp.

Sharp, who has spoken to nearly 50 residents who act as informal representatives for their neighbors, confirmed that frustration is growing as people speculate about the consequences of the repairs.

She also said she was disappointed with the city’s communications strategy.

“If we wanted to go out and tell this to the residents of this community on the street, we should have been prepared and armed with all the information – I feel like we gave these people PTSD, so I’m a little disappointed.”

“I actually said to the administration and some other council members, ‘I feel like we’re going out too early.'”

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There is also uncertainty for businesses in the neighborhood about what this new development might bring.

“There probably needs to be more communication about what exactly is going to happen,” says Melba Seto, owner of Bowness Soapworks and an advocate for businesses in the community.

The first break in the main access road led to a drastic drop in visitor numbers as traffic was diverted from 16th Avenue to Bowness Road. “At first you think, ‘Great, this will bring more attention,’ but you’re stuck in traffic. The last thing you want to do is find a parking space and go shopping,” Seto said.

Seto said small and independent businesses in the community are still recovering from the incident. “Their morale is at rock bottom. When you ask them how things are going, a lot of people say, ‘It doesn’t look good, it’s slow.'”

In addition to providing additional information about the impact the work would have on the city, the city also needs to support local businesses to offset the losses they incur, she said.

“The city needs to step in and say, ‘If you shop here, we’ll give you this kind of perk or discount.’ But the city has to pay for it – not the small businesses.”

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Because of the uncertainty, Pilarski remembers an orange fence outside her house. The fence surrounds a manhole, on the side of which is a machine that a resident suspected is an acoustic monitoring device. Pilarski said the fences were put up before the first main break. She and her husband initially called 311 and asked the city about the device – to no avail.

“Obviously something was being monitored,” Pilarski said.

When the main line broke, whistling noises were heard from the casing. Pilarski’s husband called 311 and “they basically said, ‘Oh yeah, it has something to do with the water main breaking.'”

“Forty-eight hours later, someone from the city actually came and did something, and the whistling stopped.”

Pilarski, who runs a PR and marketing firm, still doesn’t know what happened.

She sees the incident as a metaphor for the city’s failure to allay the concerns of its citizens.

“When a government presents a plan, it needs to think about every question that might potentially come its way so that it can inspire confidence and build trust among citizens in what it is going to do,” she said.

“Telling us at this point, ‘Okay, maybe you don’t have access for a month, maybe you don’t have this for a month,’ doesn’t really help us plan.”

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