Work has restarted repairing a large feeder main break near 16 Avenue N.W. and Home Road following an incident overnight that injured two workers on site.
Shortly before 10 p.m. Wednesday night, a City employee and a contractor working on welding repair were injured. Both workers were transported to hospital, one in stable, non-life threatening condition and one in serious, non-life threatening condition. Work was shut down immediately to keep the site safe. Following Occupational Health and Safety Alberta’s inspection this morning deeming the site safe, work is expected to resume this afternoon.
“Due to the safety incident that occurred overnight, we had to temporarily pause our work on site today. The safety of our staff is our number one priority,” says City of Calgary Chief Administrative Officer David Duckworth. “Our thoughts are with our workers as they recover. This incident is a reminder that while we are committed to this critical work it can also be dangerous. It is more important that we do it safely and not just fast.”
Calgarians are depending on us to continue this repair work to help return our system to normal as fast as possible. However, a safety investigation and thorough post-incident review will help us understand what happened and why, and what actions we can implement to improve our systems, processes, and practices moving forward.
“The work being done to restore water resources to Calgarians is critical but we need to ensure worker safety,” said Director of Occupational Health and Safety Chris Collier. “Keeping employees safe is one of our core values at The City of Calgary. We will continue working with OHS Alberta and this incident will be included in our after action review.”
In the meantime, the removed pipe was transported to another location for additional failure analysis. We continue to assess the information collected from our inspections to inform our plans going forward. We are in the final stages of completing the repair and are finalizing our plan to return the pipe back into service.
City-wide water restrictions are expected to remain in place into next week. Calgary remains in mandatory Stage 4 outdoor watering restrictions and it is imperative that Calgarians continue conserving water so demand does not outstrip supply.
BYLAW AND ENFORCEMENT
We continue following up on calls to 311 for water misuse. Since the event began, we have received 1,250 calls, the majority of those have been resolved with 70 cases remaining open.
Since last Thursday, we’ve had 432 conversations with Calgarians, providing education on water use and the fire bans, followed by 376 written warnings. To date, two violation tickets for water use were issued to private construction contractors.
A fire ban remains in effect for the City of Calgary. One ticket was issued related to open fire use.
ROADS AND MOBILITY
Detours are in place as 16 Avenue remains closed at Home Road N.W.
The City of Calgary thanks affected residents and businesses for their patience and cooperation during this time.
For more information and a resource of frequently asked questions visit Calgary.ca/16avewatermain or contact 311.
12 июн 2024
