[timun]

Originally Posted by Zary's-Mustache

How is the city going to lift restrictions? At the same time or just have different zones slowly open?

I don't think you can lift restrictions to the city in all areas at the same time because you don't want everyone watering their grass and plants at the same time.

I think having quadrants opening at certain days will be best approach.

Originally Posted by Parallex

Why? It's not like we'll have a lack of water. Once Bearspaw is back up and running we'll have double the treated water supply.

Originally Posted by Zary's-Mustache

That still might not be enough if they lift restrictions and you have hundreds of thousands of people watering their grass for hours on end at the same time.

Just my opinion. I think we might run into a problem if they just lift restrictions at a set day and time for everyone.

Your worries about "hundreds of thousands of people watering their grass" are way overblown. It's going to rain Thursday-Friday this week, and likely Monday-Tuesday next week: other than people who laid down fresh sod or planted trees recently, basically nobody needs much in the way of water for the sake of vegetation right now. And even if they did it won't be a big deal.

With respect to demands on the system, keep in mind the main in question will be filled, flushed, tested, flushed again, tested again before it nominally returns to full service and we have the "A-OK" to go back to normal. In reality the line will "work" for several days before it's called "done".

Frankly there are huge swaths of the city that hypothetically never really "had" to go on restrictions from a technical perspective. There are only so many interconnections, that are only 'so' big, between the pressure zones in the distribution system. The consumption of households in Tuscany, Royal Oak and Rocky Ridge for instance, and from neighbourhoods on the south side of the city south of... eh, Glenmore Trail-ish?... could have gone to zero: it still wouldn't have increased the ability to keep the rest of the city going.

The real danger of collapse in the system has always been the parts of the city east of Nose Hill. Where the feeder main broke is right by the single most critical pumping station in the system: the one at the bottom of Shaganappi Trail and Bowness Road/16th Ave. That pumping station feeds a big main to reservoirs at the foot of Nose Hill, northwest of 14th Street and John Laurie Blvd. (Ever noticed the fields south of the Winter Club surrounded by chain-link fence with no-trespassing signs, topped with barbed wire? A big, seemingly random chunk of land, the layout of which basically says "####-off-and-go-away" to everyone? That'd be the reservoirs!) From there the rest of the central-north parts of the city—all those 'Hills' neighbourhoods; Huntington, Panorama, Beddington, Coventry, etc.—are served, with other reservoirs located along the east side of Nose Hill. They don't otherwise interconnect with the west side of Nose Hill (yet; there is a project on the books to add a new feeder main to link them), and it all flows downhill to the east from there.