The Decibel - The sorry state of Canada’s water pipes

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

When a large drinking water pipe burst in Calgary last month, city residents were subject to water usage restrictions that lasted for weeks. Living in big cities, people tend to take it for granted that they can turn on a tap and clean, drinkable water will come out. But losing that ability calls into question how reliable our drinking water infrastructure really is.Globe reporters Tu Thanh Ha and Oliver Moore investigated the state of drinking water systems in Canada’s 10 biggest cities. Oliver joins the show to talk about what they found, and why cities have such a hard time keeping such an essential service in a state of good repair.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

You probably don't think much about your water pipes. They're the kind of thing that just work. Until they don't. In June, a major water pipe ruptured in Calgary, and the city was cut off from more than half of its water supply. People had to shorten showers and skip doing laundry. The city called it catastrophic, and only started easing water restrictions weeks after the break. In the aftermath of Calgary's water troubles, Globe

reporters Oliver Moore and Duthan Ha looked into the state of drinking water pipes in Canada's 10 biggest cities. Today, Oliver is here to tell us what they found and why cities are struggling to maintain their water pipes. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Oliver, great to have you here. Pleasure. So you and our colleague Ha looked at the state of drinking water pipes in Canada. This is after, of course, that one burst in Calgary last month. Just in broad terms here, Oliver, how would you characterize what you found? Well, we didn't find an awful lot of cities that are about to have pipes blow up the way Calgary's did, or rupture the way Calgary's did. But we did find that it's actually in pretty dire shape. There's a lot of water infrastructure

in this country that's in bad condition, or poor, or very poor, as it's called. A lot that it's actually in pretty dire shape. There's a lot of water infrastructure in this country that's in bad condition or poor or very poor, as it's called. A lot of it's aging, reaching the end of its useful life. And a lot of it, we don't even really know how bad it is because the inspections, the way these condition assessments are done is pretty speculative in some cases. So we found it looks bad, but we're not even sure if it's potentially worse than what we found. Huh.

Okay. Well, that sounds like it could potentially be concerning there. I guess, can we look at more details here? I know you look specifically at some of the big cities across the country. What's the state of water pipes in some of these cities? Yeah. We looked at the 10 most populous cities in the country, which about a third of Canadians live in these 10 cities. So this is a lot of people we're talking about. And some of the numbers really do jump out. Like if you look at what they call transmission pipes and local pipes, and essentially it's just a size thing.

Transmission pipes are bigger. And in Hamilton, two-fifths of the transmission pipes, 40% of them were in either poor or very poor condition. You know, in Winnipeg, you've got about twice as many water main breaks per kilometer than the industry standard. You know, Toronto is about $2 billion behind what they call state of good repair bill. The state of good repair is essentially keeping things in decent condition and, you know, Toronto is about $2 billion behind what they call it state of good repair bill. The state of good repair is essentially keeping things

in decent condition and, you know, maintenance and upkeep. $2 billion is a lot of money, even for a city the size of Toronto. Yeah. Wow. And I'm wondering, do you know, like, if we're talking about old cities versus new cities, is there a vast difference there in terms of the state of those water pipes?

One of the ones we looked at was Peel Region because Mississauga and Brampton are both within the top 10 cities in the country and they're part of Peel Region. This is GTA of Toronto basically. Yeah, well just west of Toronto exactly. And they said they had no state of good repair backlog. And I kind of went back to them

and I was like, just so we're clear what I'm asking. And they said, no, we don't. And that could be because it's a newer city, newer infrastructure because I don't think they're building pipes in any different way than anyone else is doing. And so it may be the case that they are building infrastructure so it's newer than what, say, places like Toronto and Montreal have. And so there's going to be a big build coming down the line, but so far it hasn't kind of got to them yet. I talked earlier about pipes reaching the end of their lifespan. A lot

of the pipes in Canada were built in the 50s and 60s. And so they're starting to get pretty aged. A lot of what would have been built in Peel was built since then. So at some point it will reach the age of the other pipes. Okay. Makes sense. And just to be clear, this is potable water, right? So this is not sewage system we're talking about? We looked as best we could at drinking water specifically in part because it's, you know, sewage is important, but drinking water is necessary for life. We couldn't always winkle these out because cities often gave us numbers for their system as a whole. But yeah, we've tried to focus as much as we could on drinking water, though sewage and

wastewater, it's a big deal. I mean, for listeners in Toronto or all of Southern Ontario, an awful lot of rain fell recently and there's flooding, there's overflow issues. I mean, Toronto has the situation where at a certain amount of rainfall, the sewage and the regular pipes start to mingle. And so an enormous amount of sewage went into Lake Ontario as a result of that rainfall. And in fact, about a year and a half ago, Ontario's financial watchdog was the effect of climate change that stormwater and wastewater pipes, municipalities in Ontario would have to spend about $700 million more per year compared to what they're doing now just to keep it in decent shape. And they're already not keeping it in good enough shape. Okay, yeah.

So this is definitely something to think about in the future as we see the effects of climate change. Oliver, can we talk about Calgary for a minute here? Because I think we mentioned that pipe that burst in Calgary in June. Can you just, I guess, remind us what happened there and what kind of pipe was that? What actually occurred? We talked a moment ago about big pipes and small pipes. This was a big pipe. This was a pipe coming from a water treatment facility that carried water for about 60% of the population of Calgary.

So we're talking a substantial pipe. Wow. I think the stat I saw was that the pipe was big enough to drive a truck through or something. I didn't see that, but that's a big pipe. It's a big pipe, yeah. And yeah, it's ruptured. And so it's a bit of a mystery at this point, why it ruptured. A lot of cities I think are looking at Calgary and wondering, one of the engineering guys I talked to said, other cities have pipes too of this same sort of age. Is there a fundamental problem with this pipe? Was it installed badly? Was it built badly? Or is it a systemic problem with that pipe? Was it installed badly? Was it built badly?

Or is it a systemic problem with that kind of pipe? Modeling showed it was about half of its lifespan. It was about 49 years old and they said it should last 100 years. It hadn't been physically inspected in a while, but according to their best estimates, it was a good quality pipe. Everything should have been fine. Of course, it was not fine. And for about four or five weeks, City of Calgary's on major water restrictions and they got it going before the stampede, but it was a bit touch and go, it sounded like. Yeah, it was difficult for a lot of people there, right? They had to restrict their water usage. Yeah. I mean, it really sort of brings it home pretty quickly how we rely on this. I mean, it's a cliche, but you turn on the top,

you don't think about it, but clean water pours out. And that's a very first world luxury. I mean, there's communities in Canada, First Nation communities particularly, don't have that luxury. But if you're in a city, you kind of take it for granted because you should be able to. And so when suddenly it's not there or it's there in restricted amounts, then it's, do I have a three minute shower? Do I not shower today?

Do I shower tomorrow? I mean, it's not life or death, but it's pretty unpleasant, I think. Yeah, especially when we're used to that, right? I want to ask you about the age of pipes here because you mentioned this pipe in Calgary was 49 years into a 100-year lifespan. Is that kind of normal? Like, do pipes usually last that long? Often, actually, quite a bit longer. I mean, they sort of degrade and have to be repaired and so on.

But there are pipes in certainly some of the older cities of Europe that were installed in the 19th century and are still going. I mean, one of the big catalysts for modern engineering in London was in 1858, I think it was. There was such an awful stench from the Thames. This is London, England we're talking, of course. Such a stench from the Thames. It was dubbed the Great Stink. And it actually emptied out Parliament. And it sort of kickstarted modern engineering in the city. And some of those pipes, I understand, are still there. Wow. Okay, I guess, you know, we talked about Calgary here. If this could happen in Calgary with a pipe that didn't sound like it's that old

and supposedly was in fairly good condition before this burst happened, I guess what does that mean for other cities across the country? Is this a potential for other places as well? I mean, it's hard to say because we still don't know why it happened in Calgary, but I think you could certainly draw from that that there is the potential because if you've got pipes that are in varying conditions,

there is that risk of your, what pipes are in worst condition. There's also the fact, I mentioned earlier that these condition assessments are not necessarily that great. I mean, we based some of our research off an infrastructure study

done by the federal government. And it's self-reported. The city has said, here's what we think our situation is. And Calgary said that 100% of their big pipes are either in good or very good condition. So that pipe would have been either in good or very good condition, according to their view. So if you look across the city, I think it's fair to say that

I think there's concern that there are problems lying in these pipes, essentially. that something as catastrophic as Calgary may not happen regularly, or it might. We just don't know. So now I'm curious, how do cities determine the state of their water pipes? Like, how are they testing them to say this is good condition, poor condition, somewhere in the middle? Some of it's physical inspections. Some of it's sending down robots, like robots, like robot cameras, essentially. It's kind of like a colonoscopy for a city, I suppose you'd say. A lot of it, from what I understand from engineers, it's just modeling. They look at the pressure of water going through it, the age of it, when it was last inspected, and then they make an assessment.

The assessment might turn out to be right. It might not. But why aren't physical inspections of pipes, why aren't they done more frequently? Because wouldn't that be the most effective way of doing it, I guess? Really getting eyes on, for sure. I mean, I think one of the things is that it's intrusive to do a physical inspection. You may have to shut down the pipe. If it's, you know, that one we talked about in Calgary, serves 60% of the city. It's, you know, perhaps there are redundancies they can work with, but it's intrusive and costly to actually do the physical inspection. And even if you do, one of the experts that my colleague Ha talked to, he said, what you find is not necessarily definitive. He was the example of it's like getting something to

do with the doctor. Here are your warning signs. You're a 50-year-old guy who runs and eats lots of bacon, and you're probably not going to have a heart attack, but you might. If medically your risk factors are low for something, that doesn't mean it's not going to happen. It's just less likely to happen to you than to someone else. Maybe it's the same with these pipes, as this person was saying that, sure, it's less likely to rupture than another pipe, but that doesn't mean it's not going to. The one in Calgary was going to be physically assessed this coming winter. Maybe last winter would have been a great decision, but it's hard to second guess these things because cities do have to make these judgment calls about,

do we do it this year? Do we do it next year? I mean, it's kind of a cliche, but you think of your home. If you're a homeowner, if you got a hole in the roof, you have to fix the hole in the roof. But if the roof's looking a little rough

and you're thinking, I'm a little short on money this year, maybe I can fix the roof next year. And maybe you get away with that. And that's very much what I heard from experts on the waterfowl is cities, because cities don't really have very much money. There's a certain amount of rolling the dice. I mean, one person even used the term gambling, that they kind of put it off and you put it off and you put it off and you hope for the best. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. We'll be back in a moment. Oliver, let's talk about money here, because as we've touched

on, keeping up this kind of infrastructure isn't really cheap. So how much does it cost, I guess, for cities to maintain their water pipes? It's vastly expensive. I mean, it's not buying nuclear submarines expensive, but it's very expensive. I mean, it's not buying nuclear submarines expensive, but it's very expensive. Toronto's water system as a whole has an asset value of about $87 billion. Industry standards would say that you should spend about 2% of the overall value

every year on keeping it up. The last decade, Toronto has been spending about half of that. And their projected need for the next decade is about double what they were spending for the last 10 years. So effectively, they're saying, we're going to go and spend what we should have been spending. But there's, as I said, there's not that much money. I mean, Hazel McCalley and the long-term mayor of Mississauga had this line that in Canada,

the federal government has all the power, the provinces have all the money and the cities have all the problems. And there's an element of truth to that. I mean, there's partly the pointing fingers game that can constitutionally do so well, but it is true that cities don't have a lot of money. And so higher levels of government will probably have to come in in big ways to fix some of the stuff and keep it going. Because these are the economic engines of the country. I mean, I talked earlier about how you take water for granted. It's not great for Canada. It's not great for Ontario or for British Columbia if the big cities within their regions have unreliable water. But I guess I want to ask then, why is this so challenging? If we're not spending what we need

to upkeep these water pipes, why isn't this a priority? I think it's partly that it's taken for granted. It's always there. It's only a crisis when something goes wrong. And Calgary suddenly focused a lot of attention on water. I think it's also that it's taken for granted. It's always there. It's only a crisis when something goes wrong. And as Calgary suddenly focused a lot of attention on water, I think it's also that politically water's just not a sexy topic. If you open a new community center and you're in the mayor and you go there, you'll probably get a story in the local paper about opening that community center. If you put in a new feeder pipe that replaces an old feeder pipe, to the residents, maybe nothing's changed. They still turn on their tap and water comes out. It might be more reliable. It might be a better pipe, but you're not going to get the same political plaudits for it. So certain kinds of things,

certain kinds of announcements have more political oomph than others, and water doesn't seem to have a lot. Though I talked to one guy who his organization basically advocates on behalf of city water agencies at the federal government. And I sort of said, so the issue is that water isn't sexy, right? And Nikolafsky goes, oh, I actually have a button that says water is sexy. I was like, well, you're the only one, man. Wow. I mean, I think, yeah, it might even be the opposite because if you're digging up a road to replace pipes, like people's commutes are going to be affected. Like there's all kinds of other negative effects that people might see instead.

Yeah, for sure. Right. It may not bring an obvious improvement and it might inconvenience them in the short term. Was it always like this? Like was there a time where we invested more in this infrastructure, put more of a priority on it? I think there was in a way, but it's sort of this question, similar to what we're trying with Peel Region and its newer infrastructure. I think governments like to build new things.

And so back in the 50s and 60s, when the country was expanding quickly, a lot of this got built. And I think there was more willingness back then for the federal and provincial governments to kick in money. But now there seems to be less willingness to pay for the upkeep of that same stuff. And we see that in a lot of files, whether it's transit or water pipes, governments are willing to pay to build something, but then they kind of leave it to the city to take care of it. I want to ask you what this means for housing, Oliver, because we talk a lot in this country about the need to build new houses. We're really short on places to live. But, of course, those houses come with needing water pipe infrastructure, right? So how does building all this new housing affect our water systems?

Obviously, yeah, it creates new demand. And, you know, it And one leads to the other. You can't put in a subdivision until you've put in that infrastructure. It's required, and it can't be put off in the way maintenance can be put off. But some of the experts I talked to said there's a limited amount of money, and there's a limited amount of labor. The market can only do so much of this. And so there's an element that every kilometer of pipe that's put in a new subdivision, as necessary as it is, is work that can't be done somewhere else.

And so it's not that we shouldn't be doing one and we shouldn't be doing the other. It's that we have to be doing both of them. And the people I talked to said that the new development is taking a lot of the resources, understandably. I mean, when I talked to the federal and provincial government and said, what are you doing to help cities with these issues, with the maintenance issues? A lot of what they talked about was helping development growth, which is all good, but it's not really the issue we were looking at. Yeah, that's interesting. So there's this kind of competing interests that are really at play here then. Yeah, there's a definite tension there that even if there was enough money, and it doesn't seem to be there's enough money, it's not clear that the,

so the market could do all of it at the same time, you know, building for the new developments and also bringing up, you know, to better condition the existing infrastructure. Do we have some examples of how cities are dealing with this? Because it sounds like there are a lot of issues around money and funding for water pipes. I guess, have there been any creative solutions in Canada for how to figure this out? Not super creative. I mean, from an operational point of view, a couple of cities have spun off their water governance. If you look at Toronto or Halifax or Edmonton, politicians are not directly making the decisions about water rates. And so that helps insulate politicians and essentially unpopular decisions can be made. So essentially raising the cost.

Yeah. When I say rate, I mean, yeah, the cost, the user fee for water. Some cities have now actually got back to essentially cost recovery on the operations of their water system because we're all paying higher user fees for the water. But you can't really raise the fees high enough to also fund the upkeep of the system, the capital renewal, partly because people can't afford it and probably because water is a necessity of life. There's only so much you can price it up. I mean, the water rates have gone up dramatically in some cities. And it's interesting to note that we are actually per capita using considerably less water than we were a generation ago. Really?

And that's partly because of more energy efficient appliances and so on. But it also seems to be, at least according to the economists I talked to, they say, it's because we're paying for it. And if you pay for something, you use less of it. So that's a sort of solution. It's not a perfect solution. People don't like paying more for their water. If you look at Edmonton, they spun off their water governance into a corporation called

EPCOR, for which the city is the shareholder. EPCOR was not particularly the city is the shareholder. EPCOR was not particularly forthcoming in answering our questions. And so if they were a public agency, would they have been more forthcoming? Perhaps. So it's not a perfect system, this sort of separate arm's length governance, but it has some value. Okay. And I guess we should acknowledge, we talked about this a little bit earlier, Oliver, but like, yeah, we're talking about big cities in Canada and water infrastructure, but there's a lot of places in this country that don't have basic water infrastructure, like a lot of places up north, right? A lot of First Nations communities,

they're really struggling even to just get basic infrastructure in place. Yeah. I mean, we talked about it when we were reporting on the story, and we actually talked about this quite a bit because it feels almost wrong to write this story about, you know, poor rich city that, you know, has an old pipe, but the water still is coming out of the pipe. Meanwhile, you know, we've got First Nations communities that have had 30-year boil water advisories, but they can both be true. We've got these communities that have, it's a scandal and it should be seen as a scandal that these First Nations communities have such extensive water problems, longstanding water problems. But at the same time, it's also true that these big cities have these problems that we've been

looking at. Yeah. So Oliver, before I let you go, I mean, we've talked about how we don't really think about this infrastructure very often, right? Water pipes kind of go unnoticed until really they're not functioning properly. I guess just given what you've told us about the state of things in Canada, what are the consequences of not paying more attention to this infrastructure? Well, one of the questions we asked cities was, you know, what's your projected spend for the next 10 years, capital spend? And if you do that, what will that do to your state of good repair? Will it get better, worse, or stable? And some of them kind of danced around the question an awful lot. But some of them said, essentially, it's going to get worse even if we spend all this money, or at best, it's going to stabilize if we spend all this money. So I think that if the system is precarious now, and it certainly appears to be, it's going to take an awful lot of money to get it,

not just to keep it at this level of precarity, but to actually improve it. And something like Calgary might help, arguably, because it's brought it front of mind for a lot of people. But I'm not sure. I talked to an engineer in actually the University of Calgary. And I said, now that this is front of mind, is this going to make it a real issue? Is it going to be a political issue now? Is water going to matter in the way it didn't before? Or are people just going to kind of move on? And she laughs a bit and she says, well, I wish it was the former, but it's probably the latter. She said, you know, the pipes are going to start working again, the taps are going to work again, and people are just going to go back to their normal life. And I think she might've been right,

because if you remember some of the news stories late in the water restrictions, by the sort of the fourth week, the mayor is increasingly pleading with people saying, please, we're all in this together because they set their target of wanting to bring the water down by whatever percent it was. And for a while they did pretty well. And then it just started creeping up. So even when the repair was still underway, even when the water wasn't back to normal, people had already kind of lost interest in the conservation. Wow. So we could see that maybe play out even within a few weeks in Calgary. Yeah.

It's possible that keeping it an important sort of politically vital issue, that didn't even survive the actual specific incident in Calgary. Oliver, thank you so much for being here today. Pleasure. Thanks for your time. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wells. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy-McLaughlin, and Michal Stein.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.