City of Toronto Watermain Rehabilitation Program

Since 2015, WSP has provided the City of Toronto with design, project management, and contract administration support for watermain rehabilitation as they work to meet their 10-year goal of eliminating the state of good repair backlog.

Location

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Client

City of Toronto

Project value

$600,000,000 (2015-2024 Construction Years)

With a population of over 2.5 million, the City of Toronto is the largest city in Canada. To service residents and respective businesses, the City has a vast network of infrastructure spanning a complex urban environment. Within this environment, there are more than 6,100 km of distribution watermains mostly fabricated from either cast or ductile iron. Further, the average age of the City’s watermains is 61 years, and out of the total distribution watermains, more than 15% are over 100 years old. Through time, external corrosion, soil acidity, and cold weather has left many of these watermains in a vulnerable state as the City experiences an average of 1,100 watermain breaks every year.

Toronto Watermain Rehabilitation

WSP has collaborated with the City of Toronto to rehabilitate via structural lining, over 260 km of distribution watermains within Toronto, which amounts to ~5% of the City’s distribution watermain network.

Structural lining: Cast-in-place-pipe (CIPP) method to rehabilitate 30 to 40 km of watermains annually and is a means of pipe renewal.

2015-2024 construction years

Capital Budget

$600 M

CIPP Watermain Lining

260 km

Water Service Replacements

8,000

Valve Replacements

5,700

Fire Hydrant Replacements

1,750

Innovations brought to this program

WSP has demonstrated innovation through the following initiatives:

Development of a comprehensive communications strategy and database to respond, record, and manage all program communications with the public. The Communications Management Dashboard (CMD) is a GIS-based program which allows all enquiries to be geo-tagged and updated as the issue is resolved. This program also provides data to predict trends in community involvement for upcoming works, which we have used to implement changes in communication strategies and contract specifications that has resulted in positive impact to our communities.
Implementation of digital daily reporting. For a program delivery model with tens of active sites at any given time, the digital daily reports have reduced end-of-month negotiations with contractors regarding payments and the database allows the client to access the most up-to-date financial data for all project sites, helps track spending trends, and implement changes to design and contracts to optimize contract spending.
Continued development of CIPP specifications based on findings from liner test results and information gathered through the Quality Assurance/Quality Control review of kilometers of rehabilitated watermain.
We have developed an online GIS tool and environment, “GeoRehab”, to assist the designers calculate quantity estimates, review the drawings, and make changes easily. This movement to the GIS online system is an integrated design solution from data collection through detailed design and has helped save 20% of our effort spent for creating detailed estimates, which translates to lesser cost for the City. We continue to automate our estimation procedures further to validate manual estimation and optimize future delivery.
WSP has developed a comprehensive cost tracking tool “Spendly” to track all capital costs incurred to date, create cashflow trends, and provide WSP with the ability to provide customized cost forecasts to the City.
Through the newly developed new tool, “PipeTube”, WSP has optimized the tedious process of manually filing and reviewing each CCTV inspection video. PipeTube is an automated program that can store videos uploaded to its database. Employing machine learning, the tool is trained to identify, mark, and report defects within a relined watermain from the hundreds of kilometers of CCTV inspection videos available.

Steeles Avenue West emergency relining

In the summer of 2020, several breaks on the 300 mm watermain on Steeles Avenue West were causing significant impact to production at a large pharmaceutical campus. Through the Program, WSP helped deliver an emergency watermain lining from Dufferin Avenue to Hidden Trail. The challenge was that the watermain was at the edge of a pressure boundary and serviced one of the City’s largest consumers of water. Reliable water supply during construction was critical. Our solution involved engineering a temporary bypass design based on field-verified hydraulic modelling. This resulted in the first-ever triple 150 mm watermain bypass system implemented in the City.

The outcome was the successful delivery within approximately 6-8 weeks and the temporary bypass system maintained adequate pressure and flow to support the facility’s operations.

What is watermain lining?

Cured-in-Place-Pipe (CIPP) Watermain Lining is a method of watermain renewal achieved through the installation of a lining on the interior of existing aging watermains. First, the interior of the watermain is cleaned using any number of tools, including high-pressure washing and scrapers to remove any existing linings, tuberculation, and buildup to create a smooth surface. The liner, composed of either an unreinforced or glass reinforced felt tube, is impregnated with a thermos-setting resin and inserted into the existing watermain. Following installation, the liner is cured using hot air or hot water until hardened.

Water service connections are robotically re-instated from the interior of the pipe, or by tapping a new service from the exterior. In addition to laboratory testing of liner samples, the liner quality is inspected using CCTV camera and any deficiencies are removed and replaced. All valves, hydrants, and sub-standard water services are replaced as part of the work, resulting in a renovated water system.

The rehabilitated watermain is designed to last 50 years.

Why choose watermain rehabilitation?

Compared to traditional watermain replacement, the use of CIPP and Cathodic Protection are cost-effective and less invasive solutions to watermain renewal due to the minimal excavations and reduced impact on the roadway. Additionally, more efficient design and planning results in a faster turnaround from identification of the watermain to the completion of rehabilitation, making this solution ideal for emergency situations.

The minimal design effort, and reduced $/m allows for a larger quantity of watermains to be renewed through rehabilitation than through replacement annually.

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