Five to seven days has now expanded to three to five weeks before things will be repaired with regard to the Calgary water main.  To deal with this, Calgarians will have to come together and be willing to get a little stinky and have their outdoor plants die.  If we don’t’ deal with this, barring other measures from the city, it could mean that in the event of an emergency, say a brush fire in nose hill park or at an apartment complex as we move into the hottest months of summer, there simply won’t be enough water pressure for emergency crews to deal with it.

That sounds bad enough until you remember that five to eight weeks brings us into the early weeks of July, when the Calgary Stampede takes place.  A time when the population of this city often doubles, and a time which many of the businesses in Calgary rely on to operate in the black.

It’s a bit of a lose-lose situation, and it’s made worse when you realize that part of why it’s occurring is that they’ve found some materials used in the construction of the pipe only lasted about half the time that they were intended to, fifty years instead of a century.  The cynic in me suggests that some developer or construction magnate in the 70s took advantage of some cost savings with the reasonable expectation that if things failed too early, they wouldn’t be around to go after.  However, it could just be that some assumptions were made of how long things would last when they were too new to be fully understood.  Either way though, this suggests that the entirety of the mains under the city could be in a similar situation, as there were no warning signs before this failure happened.

What this means for the city is that, no matter what, this is going to hurt the city.  How this connects to AU is in the notion of disaster assistance.  When wildfires have ripped across Fort McMurry AU, to their credit, provided aid to students in the region with extensions and other assistance. This is unlikely to happen this time, as the damage done will be more indirect: added stress to students in Calgary, difficulties with employment and troubles of a more economic nature.  This isn’t to suggest that it should happen, but it just reminds me of how we as people tend to address all issues.  Obvious problems we deal with, and often society even comes together to help handle them.  The more insidious types of problems however, the ones that can last for years without quick outward evidence often go unremarked or even penalized further as they affect individuals.

So to us, it should be seen as a reminder that sometimes people failing stems from things beyond themselves.

Meanwhile, this issue of the Voice is another fairly short one, though it still manages to have some interesting articles in it, with Cities in Six looking at Dawson City in the Yukon, [blue rare] investigating the spaces and silences that permeate our memories, and Xine Wang giving us a short tour of Calgary’s Lilac festival.

Plus, we have a couple of inspiring articles, scholarships, events, and more!

Enjoy the read!