It’s June 20, the longest day of the year, and I’m standing in a bucket in the shower. It’s a narrow, rectangular red bucket, and I have one foot in front of the other, trying to catch as much water as I can.

No, it’s not a solstice ceremony. It’s what I’ve been told I should do to save the most amount of water and have some left to keep my house plants alive during Calgary’s water crisis, precipitated by a water main break June 5.

Most Canadians probably don’t think much about water. They turn on the tap and clean, drinkable water, cold or hot on demand, comes out, and it’s practically free. Canada has about 20% of the world’s fresh water but only accounts for 6% of its land mass and under one half of one percent of its population.

Maybe I am an anomaly. I think a lot about water, given the forest fires of 2023, proposals for open pit coal mines in Alberta, drought worries, and shrinking glaciers that feed the headwaters of the Bow River. The Bow provides the majority of Calgary’s drinking water (about 60%). Bow Glacier has been steadily retreating for about 175 years, while the city of Calgary has grown from a population of a few hundred to a metropolis of almost 1.7 million people. The other 40% of Calgary’s drinking water comes from the Elbow River, which has its source in Elbow Lake. A 2023 paper in the journal Science estimates that Western Canada will lose 60 to 100% of its glaciers by the year 2100.

Now It’s Personal

With the water main break, suddenly it’s personal. The tap is not a certainty. It’s not as bad, as I’ve heard some Calgarians suggest, as some of the 28 Indigenous communities in Canada with long-term boil water advisories or the estimated two billion people without safe drinking water globally. Aside from a five-day boil-water advisory in the community of Bowness which was lifted on June 10, water still does come out of the tap, and it’s clean and drinkable. We’ve just been asked to use less—or else one day we might turn the tap and nothing will come out.

Calgary uses a lot of water. Each individual Calgarian consumes an average of 7,000 litres a month, including water used for irrigation. As a city, that’s millions of litres a day with current normal usage. Citizens have been asked to cut back to under the critical threshold of 480 million litres a day, which allows enough water in reserve for emergencies. On June 22, the city managed to reduce usage to the 451-million-litre mark.

And Alberta doesn’t use the most residential water per capita in the country. Statistics Canada estimated the average daily residential use per capita in 2021. While Albertans accounted for an estimated 195 litres per capita per day, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Saskatchewan and British Columbia all used more.

And so water becomes more valuable. At least, it does to most. There are reports of people who don’t seem to care, not making any changes at all. But crises like these require a high level of social trust—the belief in the reliability, integrity, and honesty of others—to ensure communities can navigate them successfully. Fortunately, most Calgarians are doing their part to keep water use down, making sure everyone gets some and there is still enough left for emergencies. The $3,000 fine for not following restrictions is a stick for those who aren’t as community-minded.

‘Laundry Tourism’

Wanting to do our part, we make plans. We’ll have short showers, and only every three days. No baths. By silent consent, we each choose a bathroom so we can flush only when absolutely necessary. Big buckets go under the drain spouts to catch rainwater. We have the luxury, as many don’t, of having a shared property outside the city from where we bring home large jugs of potable water so we don’t need to use city water. We take advantage of our time elsewhere to shower and do laundry, participating in what Mayor Jyoti Gondek has dubbed “laundry tourism”. The nearby town of Cochrane, on a separate water system, has an enterprising laundromat welcoming Calgarians.

I research how much water my dishwasher uses compared to doing dishes by hand. A shower definitely uses less water than a bath (my big red bucket proves this). I use a cup of water to brush my teeth and I am very aware, suddenly, of how much water I would have normally literally just let go down the drain.

A week to ration water seems long until suddenly it could be five. I watch Mayor Gondek’s press conferences for updates as avidly as I watched the COVID press conferences in early 2020. The city becomes obsessed over whether the Calgary Stampede, the city’s signature summer event, will be able to go ahead. In 2013 when Calgary flooded, the tagline of the Stampede was “Hell or High Water”. Now it’s possibly “Hell or No Water”. But the city declares that the show must go on, and suddenly July 5, opening day of the Stampede, becomes the new target to finish repairs.

Our Common Future

I can’t help but think that this focus on water use is (to borrow a phrase from the 1997 Brundtland Report) our common future, and not just in Calgary. Setting aside climate change and shrinking glaciers, Canada’s aging infrastructure is a continuing threat. The pipe that ruptured in Calgary was in year 49 of an anticipated 100-year life cycle. The Canadian Infrastructure Report 2019 assessed the state of Canada’s potable water infrastructure, noting that the majority of it was constructed between 1970 and 1999, in the same range as the pipe that ruptured in Calgary. Some of it is older.

Combine the infrastructure issue with the anticipated consequences of climate change and we have a double threat. The City of Calgary’s water efficiency plan recognizes that our current use of water is unsustainable due to growing demand, a finite supply within the Bow and Elbow watersheds, the uncertain impact of climate change, and a decrease in water quality.

People like me aren’t the largest users of water, though. The oil and gas sector in Alberta used more than 200 billion litres of fresh water in 2022. And if that seems like a lot, the allocation for Alberta’s agriculture industry is about four times larger. It’s a reminder that we live in a semi-arid region, the famous Palliser’s Triangle, after John Palliser who explored the area in the 1850s and found it “unsuitable for agriculture” due to its dry climate. It’s now the largest irrigated landscape in Canada.

There are positives. Glacier melt, it turns out, is something that perhaps I shouldn’t be quite as worried about when it comes to water supply in Calgary. Research undertaken by scientists at the Mountain Waters Future Initiative indicates that most of the recharge in rivers during the two to three months of melting is actually snowpack and rain. During the months with no snowmelt, much of the river water is fed by groundwater draining slowly from aquifers created by glacial moraines, talus, and rock glaciers.

The Solutions Ahead

There are mitigating political actions that can be taken. For consumers, those include metering, raising the cost of water (perhaps staggered, like tax brackets, and differentiated by residential or commercial uses), and regulations governing how water is used and when, such as ongoing outdoor watering restrictions. Maybe I get to water my garden on Thursdays, and the next community on Tuesdays.

Longer-term solutions should involve multidisciplinary teams. These solutions could include more stringent building codes and water-conserving standards for appliances that use water, such as bathtubs, showerheads, dishwashers, and toilets. Homebuilders could be required to install rainwater collection systems for new houses and retrofits. Maybe new communities collect this water in a communal aquifer, or build wetlands (I don’t mean man-made lakes) into community design. Many disciplines need to come together here including urban planners, environmental scientists, builders, governments, and product designers.

And perhaps the centuries-old concept of the lawn (from the old French “launde”, possibly meant as a protected communal area for animals to graze and later as a show of ostentatious wealth for large landowners), which uses about 950 litres of water per week, can be replaced by a return to native plants and grasses, a boon to both water conservation and local biodiversity.

We also need solutions for industries including agriculture, mining, and energy. The Alberta oil sands and fracking are massive users of water and they will compete ever more closely with an increasing population for scarce water resources. Beyond the issue of water scarcity lie the related concerns of what industries put in the water, including sediment, heavy metals, and selenium, pitting agriculture and ranching against mining.

From my big red bucket, I can see that change is coming. The 2024 Calgary water crisis is just the beginning.

Elizabeth Henderson lives and works in Calgary and has been following local environment and resource use issues since the 1990s.