‘Twas the night before New Years Eve, and all through the city, nothing was stirring… except gallons of water. Again.
When Calgary’s primary water feeder main ruptured on December 30, 2025, many residents braced for confusion and frustration. After all, the city had already lived through a water crisis in 2024 tied to the same critical piece of infrastructure, and few would say it was handled well.
What followed, however, was not a repeat of last summer. Same pipe, same city – very different communications response.
A tale of two crises
The 2024 feeder main rupture quickly became a case study in how fragile public trust can be when communication lags behind reality. Information was slow to emerge, accountability was unclear, and residents were left asking basic questions about how a pipe supplying roughly 60 per cent of Calgary’s drinking water could fail so badly.
After the second rupture this past December, an independent third-party review brought those concerns into sharper focus. The report painted a bleak picture of how Calgary governed and managed its water utility assets over the past two decades. Notably, it revealed that inspection recommendations in 2017, 2018, and 2022 were deferred or redirected. This provided additional context for why public confidence had eroded so deeply.
In theory, a repeat failure should have triggered a full-blown reputational crisis. But instead of responding reactively, the City took a proactive approach through a communications response that felt almost like a reset.
Leadership set the tone
A major difference this time was leadership visibility. Mayor Jeremy Farkas, elected this fall, moved quickly and decisively into the public spotlight.
He communicated early and often, across both official City of Calgary channels and his own personal platforms. He spoke regularly with media, shared daily updates and avoided vague reassurance. Perhaps most importantly, he was candid. He gave us a peek behind the curtain and shared the efforts he was making in his own home to try and preserve water, speaking openly about the city’s aging infrastructure and describing the system as a “ticking time bomb underneath our streets”.
While this language was blunt, it was what Calgarians needed to hear. It signaled that he saw residents as capable of understanding complexity rather than a delicate audience that needed the truth to be cushioned. For communicators, this underscores a critical point – credibility is built when leaders are visible and willing to say hard truths out loud.
Meeting people where they are
Another clear shift was how comprehensively the City used its communications toolkit.
Updates were shared daily on social media, banners appeared on the City’s garbage collection app and alerts even showed up in The Weather Network app, urging residents to reduce water usage.
Traditional media was also leveraged proactively, with consistent interviews that made the news hard to miss. Personally, I had family members in Ontario call me to say they had heard Calgary’s mayor on the radio talking about the water situation. Coming back from the holidays, nearly every conversation with colleagues and friends started the same way: “So… how’s the water?”
That kind of awareness doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of deliberate communications and channel planning along with disciplined message repetition.
Not happy, but better informed
Perhaps the most telling outcome was the shift in public sentiment. In 2024, the overall reaction was outrage and disbelief. This time, the mood felt different. More weary than angry – more “here we go again” than “are you kidding me?”
This shift is important to note. Not because people were suddenly happy or even fully compliant, but because they were reacting to a different communications environment.
Despite constant updates and repeated calls from the City to reduce water use, overall consumption did not drop in a meaningful way. Calgarians were still frustrated, still inconvenienced and still pushing back in small ways. But clear, frequent communication reduced uncertainty, which in turn lowered anxiety. It demonstrated that when people understand what is happening, what it means for them and what comes next, they tend to react more calmly, even if they aren’t thrilled about it.
What communicators can learn
Calgary’s 2025 water crisis reinforced several crisis communications truths:
- Transparency builds trust, even when the news isn’t ideal
- Repetition across channels is reassurance, not redundancy
- Context changes how people perceive both risk and responsibility
That doesn’t mean every aspect of this response was flawless. For residents in the communities most directly affected by the rupture, ongoing disruptions, repeated access to private property with little notice and the emergence of fraudulent bad actors added another layer of strain.
The key takeaway is that crisis communications is not about perfection. It’s about learning in real time, applying past lessons and responding with clarity, consistency and empathy when the stakes are high.
The infrastructure may have failed again, but this time, Calgary’s communications held strong. That distinction made a meaningful difference in how the crisis was understood and ultimately absorbed by Calgarians, even in the face of ongoing frustration.
