Several businesses and residents were without water for more than 24 hours as the Town of Banff tried to fix a water main leak in downtown Banff on Sunday (Jan. 3), forcing some to close their doors.
The Town of Banff was alerted to the leak when lululemon reported water seeping into its business on the 100 block of Banff Avenue at about 5 p.m. Sunday. There was also water in the alley behind the business.
Town crews were able to isolate the valve leak between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. that night, and with the help of a contractor, had the problem fixed 24 hours later.
“There was a valve that was leaking and as a result we had to isolate that section of the water distribution main in order to repair it,” said Paul Godfrey, the Town of Banff’s operations manager. “I would say it was approximately 24 hours without water for several businesses.”
Several downtown buildings were affected, including the buildings that house Nesters Market grocery store and residential apartments above, the Keg steakhouse, and Elk and Oarsman Pub.
Officials with the Banff Lodging Company, which owns both Keg restaurants in Banff, had to close its downtown location on Monday.
Chris Thorburn, the company’s director of operations, said it’s always concerning when businesses lose water, particularly food and beverage outlets.
He said they had to move all the contents of their fridges and freezers to another location.
“Most critically for us was on the evening they shut the water down, we recognized our fridges and freezeRs would be inoperable because they are water cooled,” he said.
“We’re lucky because we’re a bigger operation and we have other outlets and we were able to move inventory.”
Thorburn said the company is thankful the water main leak didn’t happen the week before during the busy Christmas holiday break.
“If it had happened in the busy Christmas period, it would have been a catastrophe,” he said.
Thorburn said he appreciated the work the Town of Banff did to get the problem fixed.
“We applaud their commitment to getting this fixed. They worked through the night,” he said.
Godfrey said the Town of Banff hired a local contractor first thing Monday, but after that company had some equipment failure while trying to break through the ice in the alley to get to the pipe, they had to hire another contractor from out of town later in the day.
“He had the repairs done in a few hours and everything was back on by 11 p.m. Monday,” said Godfrey.
A new benchmarking report on municipal water services, aimed at setting the stage for municipalities to identify trends, establish priorities and make changes as needed in the delivery of water services to residents, showed Banff has more water main breaks than most.
Participating municipalities were Airdrie, Banff, Beaumont, Canmore, Cochrane, Red Deer, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Okotoks and Wetaskiwin.
From 2012 to 2014, there were 18 water system failures in Banff, which is served by 59 kilometres of pipes.
The only other municipality with more system failures was Lethbridge, with 153 failures over 588 km of pipes. However, due to the smaller amount of pipeline, Banff has a comparable ratio of system failures per 100 km of pipe to Lethbridge.
Godfrey said Banff’s higher number of water main breaks are attributed to its ageing infrastructure, which is among the oldest of the participating municipalities, as well as the fact that pipes installed decades ago were not installed to standards acceptable today.
“This pipe was 47 years old,” he said.
