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Winnipeg residents seeing reports of flooded streets and water restrictions after a major water main break in Calgary may be wondering whether something like that could happen here, especially considering the same type of pipe can be found under Winnipeg streets.
In late December, a major water feeder main ruptured in northwest Calgary, flooding roads and forcing the city to impose strict limits on water use. Crews are still repairing the damage more than a month later.
And it wasn’t the first failure. The same section of pipe also ruptured in 2024, with repairs that dragged on for months.
After that first break, the City of Calgary created an independent review panel to determine how the rupture happened — and whether it could happen again. The panel’s final report was released just over a week after the most recent failure.
“This is an emergency situation,” panel chair Siegfried Kiefer told reporters at a news conference in early January.
The report found Calgary had known about problems with this type of pipe since 2004, but inspections and upgrades were repeatedly deferred. The result was a system that lacked enough resilience and redundancy to prevent a major disruption, Kiefer said.
Crews work at the Bearspaw feeder main break site in Calgary, which caused flooding and ongoing water restrictions in the city. (City of Calgary)
Calgary’s situation, he said, isn’t unique.
“The industry as a whole has been aware of this problem,” Kiefer said in an interview on CBC Radio’s The Current. “Many other municipalities — Montreal, Halifax, Winnipeg — have all had the same style of pipe installed in their networks.”
That raises a question: how vulnerable is Winnipeg?
The City of Winnipeg says its water system includes about 119 kilometres of feeder mains made of pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipe — much of it installed in the 1960s and 1970s, similar to the pipe that failed in Calgary.
But Calgary lags behind other cities in terms of inspecting, repairing and adding resilience to its water system, Kiefer said.
Key differences
City of Winnipeg officials and councillors say there are important differences.
Water and waste committee chair Ross Eadie says Winnipeg adopted stricter construction standards than many other cities and never relaxed those standards when industry practices changed in the 1970s.
“We’ve never had a leak in these pipes,” Eadie said.
Winnipeg’s feeder mains are in better shape because of those higher standards, combined with ongoing inspections, he said.
“So our pipes are faring much better than other cities,” Eadie said. “Through the inspections, we find things and we fix them up.”
Eadie also points to scale. Calgary’s Bearspaw feeder main is a six‑foot‑wide pipe that carried a large share of the city’s water. Winnipeg’s feeder mains, by contrast, are generally smaller.
“We don’t have anything that’s that wide,” he said.
Important investments
City administrators say the design of Winnipeg’s system further reduces the risk of a catastrophic failure.
“All our feeder mains are interconnected,” said Tim Shanks, director of the city’s water and waste department. “We can turn off any segment of these feeder mains and the supply is maintained.”
Shanks said Winnipeg also benefits from clay soils that slow corrosion, as well as regular inspections of high‑risk river crossings and other feeder mains using advanced monitoring technology.
That doesn’t mean the city is immune to failures.
In 2024, a sewage pipe beneath the Red River near the Fort Garry Bridge ruptured, forcing emergency repairs. That pipe also dated back to the 1970s, though it was made of a different material.
Untreated sewage flowed into the Red River near Fort Garry Bridge after a pipe under the river broke in 2024. (Trevor Brine/CBC)
City crews had identified problems during routine inspections and were in the process of carrying out repairs when the pipe failed.
Experts say cases like Calgary’s highlight a broader challenge facing municipalities across Canada — investing in infrastructure that the public rarely sees.
“No one’s elected on putting in a new pipe,” said Kerry Black, a civil engineering professor at the University of Calgary. “No one’s elected on making sure that your water costs a bit more so that we can make sure we can maintain it.”
Eadie takes issue with the suggestion that Winnipeg has avoided those investments. He points to recent increases in water and sewer rates to help fund upgrades at the North End Wastewater Treatment Plant.
“I actually took some offence,” Eadie said. “We’re putting money into our essential systems — the water and the sewer — and it raises people’s rates, and they’re angry about it.”
The City of Winnipeg says it has inspected nearly 21 kilometres of feeder mains so far and plans to begin a new assessment of the condition of large‑diameter pipes later this year.
While Winnipeg faces many of the same challenges as other aging cities, officials say the likelihood of a Calgary‑style feeder main failure is lower — and even if one did occur, the consequences would be far more manageable. \
WATCH | Could a Calgary-style water main disaster happen in Winnipeg?:
Could a Calgary-style water main disaster happen in Winnipeg?
Winnipeg, like many Canadian cities, has the type of water pipe that failed in Calgary. Could Winnipeg face a water main crisis, as well?
