Calgary water main physics

 Calgary has the same thing we all have in Canada.  That's 70's reinforced concrete with insufficient cover over the outer steel.

No pictures, so try to think.  They went nuts with this concrete, lighter, cheaper, stronger than steel.  It's a curse on the land.  Comprised of lots of steel wires, helping to strengthen the concrete against tension.  For a pressure pipe, the mechanism of support is completely different than a bridge, yet in Ontario we are replacing all those bridges.  The main problem is that the road salt penetrates the concrete and starts a process, with the very first contact of a chlorine atom with iron.  I don't think they every appreciated the magnificence of the physics here.

For a pressure pipe, we supposedly don't have road salt, so everybody went to sleep.  Except in Calgary, they put these huge watermains under roads.  Does anybody else do that?  That gave tons of problems, like constant vibration, and road salt.

The first chlorine hits the steel, and everything unravels.  But this steel is under high tension.  It has stress corrosion, which means that tension doubles the speed of everything.  Once one wire is softened, the tension moves on to the next wire.

I was laughing at the first pipe, because they put so much faith in geophysical detection equipment without a speck of physics.  They just believe it works.  The Physics Says No.

They are hoping their testing tells where the next break will happen, and then they go in and replace the section with steel.  I said it wouldn't work, and obviously it didn't.  Maybe they didn't test that pipe, why not?

Anyway, this is as far as I go to create something that nobody reads.  Just another case of physics getting people's shoes wet.

ps.  sorry, I gave the impression that you could be saved if you did some physics.  That is not correct.  I can't do a little physics, I think it right through, like climate change.  Calgary's stupidity is doomed, this is like predicting earthquakes, or my inference that you could keep going with climate stupidity, if you just touched the third rail of physics.

ps Smithie is really mad at Calgary.  Makes them all look like fools....