Who takes responsibility nowadays? Pretty much no one. And certainly not the under qualified leadership we have in politics now. Further, socialism always pushes problems to the lower rungs. Socialist leaders all think they need to control the population and believe they know how the rest of us should live. There is no room there for introspection or for responsibility.
I just finished reading / listening to an audio book called "Never Finished" by David Goggins. This guy is the polar opposite of shirking responsibility. While I dont agree with some of what he concludes, his ethos and beliefs come exclusively from introspection and experience. It was fascinating to listen to just because it was such a huge outlier to what you read from the chattering classes and academia and the kind of public leadership you see today.
Lack of leadership, plain and simple. Dwight Eisenhower wrote a letter on June 5, 1944 taking full responsibility for the failing of the D-day landings......a note happily consigned to history. There isn't a "leader" anywhere in this country that would ever do that today.
Well said, Peter Menzies. In addition to Gondek’s neglect of infrastructure, I’m wondering how much attention the virtue-signalling Nenshi paid to the pipes during his lengthy reign of woke initiatives?
Penny, Nenshi totally ignored it for his whole term.
The city knew these pipes were problematic in 1980. The had reports as far back as 2004, that this needed replaced, they had another report in 2014 about high leakage in our water service. They waited for the crisis.
We still have loads of KM of this pipe that hasn’t evem been examined.
We pay plenty to the city above and beyond our property taxes (see your Enmax bill) for water services, we deserve better. We won’t get better, but we deserve it.
TBH, this kinda brings out my inner H.L Mencken in me. Sure, I am 100% for leaders who take accountability, who will speak to us with candor about whatever situation at hand. But we (the voting public) dont want that. As a Gen-X'r who pays a little more attention to politics than the average person, I have heard and read WAY TOO MANY important but not urgent stories about the importance of infrastructure and proactively fixing it etc etc. So I salute the politician who will stand up at election time and say, "I am going to raise taxes to fix problems that probably wont be an issue today or even in my mandate. But it will be a hell of a lot less to fix it now, than 5yrs from now. Oh, and I am gonna make a rainy day fund to..." [ At this point the villagers draw and quarter the earnest schmuck and kick his remains off the stage ]... So we get what we wanted, good and hard.
Shame on us for expecting continued first world quality of life for our ever-more-deeply-gouged tax dollars. Isn’t reimagining Stephen Avenue, resloganeering our city to the tune of millions, ridding us of conveniences like carry bags, and “saving the planet” enough for us? 🙄
My recon coming out of Calgary produced a viable option, and perhaps it was finally implemented.
The suggestion was rather than drastically reduce water consumption for every household, why wasn’t an odd/even address contemplated so that everyone would have a chance at personal hygiene, wash day and cleaning dishes? In drought conditions, this concept is used all the time to make people think about water usage for washing cars or lawns.
It's not even clear to me that the pipe was capable of being maintained, much less that it cracked due to a maintenance failure, and still less that the maintenance failure was Gondek's fault. Don't we usually mock people who blame politicians for every bad thing that happens while they're in office when there's no causal link?
And is she not, grating tone aside, fundamentally correct that we, the citizens of Calgary, are responsible for our behaviour and its consequences? There's no more water coming until the pipe is fixed, it can only be fixed so fast, and if we use more than that, we only have ourselves to blame if - as she warned us, and as someone had to warn us - the taps run dry.
I'm surprised the focus of your anger isn't that the Stampede is still going ahead while a state of emergency is in effect.
Clarke, This type of pipe has had known issues for decades. If city council and managers had paid attention to that they should have been inspecting it regularly. They didn’t. Lots of past mayors, councillors and managers can share that blame with Gondek, but no one has been less focussed on the core mandate of city government than Gondek. That is why people are focusing their anger on her.
Do you have a source for any of this? It's not that I don't believe you, it's just that the last time this subject came up, there was somebody in the comment section stating with equal confidence that there's no way to perform maintenance on a pipe like this.
Edit: This article by Don Braid last week suggests that the city was well aware of the need for inspections and was conducting inspections at an aggressive rate, but that this section of pipe had been assessed as having a lower risk of corrosion and assigned a lower priority, so they hadn't gotten around to it yet. It's suspected that it was originally laid with bad soil or that bad soil was later dumped near that location. So, again, not really getting the sense that any of this is Gondek's fault.
It has been revealed in the last few days that the pipe made between 1970 and 1988 has issues because of poor concrete. Apparently this is a North America-wide problem. The city engineers must have known about this issue before now. It would be unreasonable for them to assume a standard life span for this pipe. This should have led them to assume a shorter life span for the pipe with a consequent earlier replacement. I hope that there is an exhaustive public technical review of this incident. I would also agree that the city administration did not react well initially.
That's very fascinating, I'm happy to learn it, and I think it explains a lot, but it doesn't convince me that screaming at Gondek to fall on her sword is any more rational unless we get at least some evidence suggesting she was warned, given concrete (har har) recommendations that would have better prepared the City to handle this, and chose to sit on it.
I would love for us to prove that we've grown out of sacrificing the chieftain after a poor harvest like a bunch of Neolithic bog people.
We elect leaders to think strategically and prioritize. This situation indicates that she and others on council are not well suited to for this.
Calgarians questioning mayor Gondek’s track record and judgment is part of our democratic process, and is good for our democracy. I respect your right to express the aspersion that these Calgarians are like “Neolithic bog people”, but I disagree. And ultimately it will be decided as a community at the ballot box.
"Something went wrong, must have been a strategic failure" doesn't logically follow at all, and does in fact closely resemble the kind of thinking that gets tribal leadership barbecued inside a wicker man.
Good article. My impression from Roy Brander (who's on Substack) is that Calgary is quite proactive on managing its water and sewer infrastructure, much more so than most cities. They've got a water-main-break prediction model. https://brander.ca/WCW%20Main%20Break%20Prediction%20Model.pptx
Great source, thank you, and it aligns with the googling I've been doing. It seems like in this case the prediction model assessed the section that just failed as low risk, and I suspect a lot of attention is going to be paid in coming months/years to that incongruity.
If I had to guess, I'd say that most cities don't have a prediction model at all, they just go on guesswork and intuition (which seems considerably worse).
Yes, very hard to perform maintenance on an operating pipe. HOWEVER, the fact they knew there was issues and didn’t build emergency bypasses or start engineering work to replace this is on them. Critical infra structure should be designed with some redundancy.
Isn't the best evidence that it was built with some redundancy that we all have water access right now?
As for knowing that there were issues, they discovered there was risk of issues *system wide*. There's got to be over a thousand kilometers of pipe involved, and no way to know where it's falling apart expect to painstakingly inspect all of it, which they were doing at an aggressive rate.
The looming Stampede dates on the calendar are a blessing to focus minds and put the effort in to problem solving. This isn’t a time for dithering and people leaning on shovels.
that was my impression too? Or is that "big dishwasher" pulling one over on us ? ;-) Is there credible data either way on that, I am sincerely curious now.
In most cases, a dishwasher uses significantly less water than washing dishes by hand.
Modern dishwashers, especially those with an ENERGY STAR certification, can use as little as 3 gallons of water per load.
In contrast, hand washing dishes can use anywhere from 15 to 27 gallons of water per load, particularly if you have the habit of letting the faucet run while washing or rinsing dishes, or filling up a whole sink for washing.
Here's why dishwashers are generally more water-efficient:
They use a closed system that recirculates water throughout the wash cycle.
They heat the water once and use it for multiple washes within the cycle.
So, unless you're very conscientious about using minimal water while hand-washing (like quickly rinsing dishes in a low-flow faucet), a dishwasher is the more water-efficient option.
And then I asked it the source
----------------------
I apologize for not mentioning my source earlier. The information on dishwasher water efficiency comes from several resources including government websites and industry publications:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ENERGY STAR program has a page on dishwashers that mentions the water usage of both dishwashers and hand-washing: https://www.energystar.gov/products/dishwashers
If you need to go through the at-this-point useless exercise of pointing fingers at the responsible parties, you need to start by distinguishing between causative fault and consequences. Who screwed up? Possibly the system designers, possibly the pipe designer(s), possibly (and likely) the manufacturer, possibly the crews who installed the pipe, possibly (though unlikely) the maintainers. Certainly not the mayor. The fact that the consequences became apparent on her watch doesn’t make them her fault.
Yes, she’s accountable for getting it fixed, but it looks to me as if the city’s actions in that department have been reasonably diligent and sensible. As for communication, would you rather have the unpalatable truth or lies or nothing? Just because you don’t like what’s being said doesn’t make it bad communication.
None of us is entitled to a life in which shit never happens. When, not if, it does, it is not at all helpful to run around in circles emitting shrill cries like Peter Menzies. Suck it up, buttercup.
Excellent article Peter. "Feeder main". So essential it was not twinned nor looped. Apparently only one valve located at the Dam. Then, the place where the South gets their water, Glenmore, has not been upgraded either (in spite of the city growing quickly.) How is that for great planning? It is not all on her shoulders, as Nenshi was the Mayor for a decade and knew of the issues with this pipe, as it was failing in other cities in North America. Notice his silence on the issue. Anyway, it was good news for my house as I was finally able to tell my 12 year old to stop talking hotel showers, and my wife to stop watering her hundreds of dollars of annuals..... But due to the cost of living in Calgary, most Calgarians do not waste water anyway. On her first day on the job Gondek issued a "Climate Emergency". Perhaps she should have issued an "Infrastructure Emergency" and instead of killing the first arena deal with her demands for solar panels and bike lanes and parking, she should have focussed on municipal issues facing the city, like it's failing infrastructure, and bring in private contractors, and the unions cannot seem to get it done.
Failure to accept responsibility is a virus infecting all levels of government in Canada. Unfortunately the voters consistently fail to hold their elected officials responsible at the ballot box.
Politicians don't need to necessarily take personal responsibility for the failure, but they *do* need to take responsibility for the response. Jyoti Gondek failed badly in that regard: opaque, non-specific messaging about what emergency measures were required, poor communication about the response to address the problem, and generally losing her head and blaming other levels of government and the public in the face of a crisis.
Much of the rot in those pipes must have occurred on Nenshi’s watch. Where is he now? Oh yeah, he’s leading the NDP and wants to get his incompetent hands on the province. Good luck when that happens!
Who takes responsibility nowadays? Pretty much no one. And certainly not the under qualified leadership we have in politics now. Further, socialism always pushes problems to the lower rungs. Socialist leaders all think they need to control the population and believe they know how the rest of us should live. There is no room there for introspection or for responsibility.
I just finished reading / listening to an audio book called "Never Finished" by David Goggins. This guy is the polar opposite of shirking responsibility. While I dont agree with some of what he concludes, his ethos and beliefs come exclusively from introspection and experience. It was fascinating to listen to just because it was such a huge outlier to what you read from the chattering classes and academia and the kind of public leadership you see today.
Lack of leadership, plain and simple. Dwight Eisenhower wrote a letter on June 5, 1944 taking full responsibility for the failing of the D-day landings......a note happily consigned to history. There isn't a "leader" anywhere in this country that would ever do that today.
Well said, Peter Menzies. In addition to Gondek’s neglect of infrastructure, I’m wondering how much attention the virtue-signalling Nenshi paid to the pipes during his lengthy reign of woke initiatives?
Penny, Nenshi totally ignored it for his whole term.
The city knew these pipes were problematic in 1980. The had reports as far back as 2004, that this needed replaced, they had another report in 2014 about high leakage in our water service. They waited for the crisis.
We still have loads of KM of this pipe that hasn’t evem been examined.
We pay plenty to the city above and beyond our property taxes (see your Enmax bill) for water services, we deserve better. We won’t get better, but we deserve it.
Thank you for confirming what I strongly suspected.
Penny, a very good question to which I have an answer: he paid no attention to these pipes.
But, no matter, he was (not) virtuous! And he was willing - eager, even - to parade his (lack of) virtue.
And the NDP have embraced that. Which begs the question, what are they willing to ignore provincially.
TBH, this kinda brings out my inner H.L Mencken in me. Sure, I am 100% for leaders who take accountability, who will speak to us with candor about whatever situation at hand. But we (the voting public) dont want that. As a Gen-X'r who pays a little more attention to politics than the average person, I have heard and read WAY TOO MANY important but not urgent stories about the importance of infrastructure and proactively fixing it etc etc. So I salute the politician who will stand up at election time and say, "I am going to raise taxes to fix problems that probably wont be an issue today or even in my mandate. But it will be a hell of a lot less to fix it now, than 5yrs from now. Oh, and I am gonna make a rainy day fund to..." [ At this point the villagers draw and quarter the earnest schmuck and kick his remains off the stage ]... So we get what we wanted, good and hard.
Are you suggesting we've got the leaders we deserve?
We have a case example right in front of us, federally since 2015.
Hey, I never voted for the head fed.
Standing next to me in this lonely crowd
Is a man who swears he's not to blame
All day long I hear him shout so loud
Crying out that he was framed
Bob Dylan
Shame on us for expecting continued first world quality of life for our ever-more-deeply-gouged tax dollars. Isn’t reimagining Stephen Avenue, resloganeering our city to the tune of millions, ridding us of conveniences like carry bags, and “saving the planet” enough for us? 🙄
Let's not forget subsizing a billionaire's arena and giant blue hula hoops!
Diane Ablonczy, you should get back into the political arena and Reform Municipal politics in Calgary.
My recon coming out of Calgary produced a viable option, and perhaps it was finally implemented.
The suggestion was rather than drastically reduce water consumption for every household, why wasn’t an odd/even address contemplated so that everyone would have a chance at personal hygiene, wash day and cleaning dishes? In drought conditions, this concept is used all the time to make people think about water usage for washing cars or lawns.
Darcy, stop coming up with common sense suggestions. It gives bureaucrats headaches.
Can Gondek really be blamed for the pipe failure?
It's not even clear to me that the pipe was capable of being maintained, much less that it cracked due to a maintenance failure, and still less that the maintenance failure was Gondek's fault. Don't we usually mock people who blame politicians for every bad thing that happens while they're in office when there's no causal link?
And is she not, grating tone aside, fundamentally correct that we, the citizens of Calgary, are responsible for our behaviour and its consequences? There's no more water coming until the pipe is fixed, it can only be fixed so fast, and if we use more than that, we only have ourselves to blame if - as she warned us, and as someone had to warn us - the taps run dry.
I'm surprised the focus of your anger isn't that the Stampede is still going ahead while a state of emergency is in effect.
Clarke, This type of pipe has had known issues for decades. If city council and managers had paid attention to that they should have been inspecting it regularly. They didn’t. Lots of past mayors, councillors and managers can share that blame with Gondek, but no one has been less focussed on the core mandate of city government than Gondek. That is why people are focusing their anger on her.
Do you have a source for any of this? It's not that I don't believe you, it's just that the last time this subject came up, there was somebody in the comment section stating with equal confidence that there's no way to perform maintenance on a pipe like this.
Edit: This article by Don Braid last week suggests that the city was well aware of the need for inspections and was conducting inspections at an aggressive rate, but that this section of pipe had been assessed as having a lower risk of corrosion and assigned a lower priority, so they hadn't gotten around to it yet. It's suspected that it was originally laid with bad soil or that bad soil was later dumped near that location. So, again, not really getting the sense that any of this is Gondek's fault.
https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/braid-backyard-garden-soil-kill-giant-water-pipeline-revelations
It has been revealed in the last few days that the pipe made between 1970 and 1988 has issues because of poor concrete. Apparently this is a North America-wide problem. The city engineers must have known about this issue before now. It would be unreasonable for them to assume a standard life span for this pipe. This should have led them to assume a shorter life span for the pipe with a consequent earlier replacement. I hope that there is an exhaustive public technical review of this incident. I would also agree that the city administration did not react well initially.
That's very fascinating, I'm happy to learn it, and I think it explains a lot, but it doesn't convince me that screaming at Gondek to fall on her sword is any more rational unless we get at least some evidence suggesting she was warned, given concrete (har har) recommendations that would have better prepared the City to handle this, and chose to sit on it.
I would love for us to prove that we've grown out of sacrificing the chieftain after a poor harvest like a bunch of Neolithic bog people.
That's a very funny analogy, and perhaps a little telling of today's mentality. Sort of a ready-shoot-aim reaction.
We elect leaders to think strategically and prioritize. This situation indicates that she and others on council are not well suited to for this.
Calgarians questioning mayor Gondek’s track record and judgment is part of our democratic process, and is good for our democracy. I respect your right to express the aspersion that these Calgarians are like “Neolithic bog people”, but I disagree. And ultimately it will be decided as a community at the ballot box.
"Something went wrong, must have been a strategic failure" doesn't logically follow at all, and does in fact closely resemble the kind of thinking that gets tribal leadership barbecued inside a wicker man.
Good article. My impression from Roy Brander (who's on Substack) is that Calgary is quite proactive on managing its water and sewer infrastructure, much more so than most cities. They've got a water-main-break prediction model. https://brander.ca/WCW%20Main%20Break%20Prediction%20Model.pptx
Great source, thank you, and it aligns with the googling I've been doing. It seems like in this case the prediction model assessed the section that just failed as low risk, and I suspect a lot of attention is going to be paid in coming months/years to that incongruity.
If I had to guess, I'd say that most cities don't have a prediction model at all, they just go on guesswork and intuition (which seems considerably worse).
Yes, very hard to perform maintenance on an operating pipe. HOWEVER, the fact they knew there was issues and didn’t build emergency bypasses or start engineering work to replace this is on them. Critical infra structure should be designed with some redundancy.
Isn't the best evidence that it was built with some redundancy that we all have water access right now?
As for knowing that there were issues, they discovered there was risk of issues *system wide*. There's got to be over a thousand kilometers of pipe involved, and no way to know where it's falling apart expect to painstakingly inspect all of it, which they were doing at an aggressive rate.
The looming Stampede dates on the calendar are a blessing to focus minds and put the effort in to problem solving. This isn’t a time for dithering and people leaning on shovels.
This isn’t on Gondek, this one is on Nenshi and his predecessor … and the councils in place then.
Gotta keep up appearances. ;-)
Interesting dishwashers use much less water and energy that doing dishes by hand
that was my impression too? Or is that "big dishwasher" pulling one over on us ? ;-) Is there credible data either way on that, I am sincerely curious now.
Consumer's Report.
I asked Big AI (Gemini in this case)
---------------------------------------------
In most cases, a dishwasher uses significantly less water than washing dishes by hand.
Modern dishwashers, especially those with an ENERGY STAR certification, can use as little as 3 gallons of water per load.
In contrast, hand washing dishes can use anywhere from 15 to 27 gallons of water per load, particularly if you have the habit of letting the faucet run while washing or rinsing dishes, or filling up a whole sink for washing.
Here's why dishwashers are generally more water-efficient:
They use a closed system that recirculates water throughout the wash cycle.
They heat the water once and use it for multiple washes within the cycle.
So, unless you're very conscientious about using minimal water while hand-washing (like quickly rinsing dishes in a low-flow faucet), a dishwasher is the more water-efficient option.
And then I asked it the source
----------------------
I apologize for not mentioning my source earlier. The information on dishwasher water efficiency comes from several resources including government websites and industry publications:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ENERGY STAR program has a page on dishwashers that mentions the water usage of both dishwashers and hand-washing: https://www.energystar.gov/products/dishwashers
Natural Resources Canada discusses dishwasher efficiency and compares it to hand-washing: https://natural-resources.canada.ca/energy-efficiency/energy-efficiency-regulations/planning-and-reporting/household-dishwashers/23610
Pretty good job you did, thanks for that. Eons ago I used to Consumer's Report for similar info. Internet was barely starting then.
Actually, it's "big dishwasher detergent" pulling one over on us.
Ah yes, the Calgon conglomerate :)
Vote woke, end up in purgatory.
"woke" is still a compliment for most people. Only a small segment of society tries...and fails ...to use it as an insult.
Look, this is just drivel.
If you need to go through the at-this-point useless exercise of pointing fingers at the responsible parties, you need to start by distinguishing between causative fault and consequences. Who screwed up? Possibly the system designers, possibly the pipe designer(s), possibly (and likely) the manufacturer, possibly the crews who installed the pipe, possibly (though unlikely) the maintainers. Certainly not the mayor. The fact that the consequences became apparent on her watch doesn’t make them her fault.
Yes, she’s accountable for getting it fixed, but it looks to me as if the city’s actions in that department have been reasonably diligent and sensible. As for communication, would you rather have the unpalatable truth or lies or nothing? Just because you don’t like what’s being said doesn’t make it bad communication.
None of us is entitled to a life in which shit never happens. When, not if, it does, it is not at all helpful to run around in circles emitting shrill cries like Peter Menzies. Suck it up, buttercup.
Excellent article Peter. "Feeder main". So essential it was not twinned nor looped. Apparently only one valve located at the Dam. Then, the place where the South gets their water, Glenmore, has not been upgraded either (in spite of the city growing quickly.) How is that for great planning? It is not all on her shoulders, as Nenshi was the Mayor for a decade and knew of the issues with this pipe, as it was failing in other cities in North America. Notice his silence on the issue. Anyway, it was good news for my house as I was finally able to tell my 12 year old to stop talking hotel showers, and my wife to stop watering her hundreds of dollars of annuals..... But due to the cost of living in Calgary, most Calgarians do not waste water anyway. On her first day on the job Gondek issued a "Climate Emergency". Perhaps she should have issued an "Infrastructure Emergency" and instead of killing the first arena deal with her demands for solar panels and bike lanes and parking, she should have focussed on municipal issues facing the city, like it's failing infrastructure, and bring in private contractors, and the unions cannot seem to get it done.
Failure to accept responsibility is a virus infecting all levels of government in Canada. Unfortunately the voters consistently fail to hold their elected officials responsible at the ballot box.
Politicians don't need to necessarily take personal responsibility for the failure, but they *do* need to take responsibility for the response. Jyoti Gondek failed badly in that regard: opaque, non-specific messaging about what emergency measures were required, poor communication about the response to address the problem, and generally losing her head and blaming other levels of government and the public in the face of a crisis.
I was waiting with anticipation for the Mayor of Calgary to point the finger of blame for the broken water pipe on the "Other" Randy.
Has no one blamed Trump yet? I thought he was responsible for the slowing of Earth's rotation. Maybe that stresses water pipes.
If he gets the second, according to him an endless term, he will be.
Much of the rot in those pipes must have occurred on Nenshi’s watch. Where is he now? Oh yeah, he’s leading the NDP and wants to get his incompetent hands on the province. Good luck when that happens!
“We can all do better” sounds ominously familiar?