As repairs wrap up on Bearspaw feeder main, no guarantee another rupture won’t happen

Crews continue to work diligently to repair the Bearspaw feeder main, which ruptured for the second time on Dec. 30, 2025, City of Calgary officials say.

“City and contractor crews have completed back-filling the site, and we’ve started repairing the road above the pipe,” Michael Thompson, general manager of the city’s infrastructure services, said in yet another update on Saturday.

“We’re currently in the process of filling the pipe. It takes almost 22 million litres of water to fill it — the equivalent of nine Olympic swimming pools full.”

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Filling the pipe could take a number of days, and once that’s completed, the water will then have to be treated and tested.

“We are going to do this very slowly and carefully,” Thompson said. “Our current schedule is early next week to have that work completed, and we will be updating Calgarians every step of the way.”

However, while crews have repaired the latest break in the critical piece of water infrastructure, Mayor Jeromy Farkas is preparing Calgarians for the likelihood of more breaks in the future.

“This pipe is sick, and it could continue to break and we could continue to face those immediate repairs,” Farkas stated. “This will be the new reality until we can fully replace the full six-kilometre pipe, which is terminally ill.”

Once the water main is brought back online, the plan is to dig up sections of the pipe in the spring and summer in order to add additional reinforcements to reduce the likelihood of another catastrophic break. The hope is that will give the city enough time to construct and install more redundancies before eventually replacing the Bearspaw feeder main entirely.

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