Multi-million dollars Calgary Glenmore and MacLeod Trail interchange “engineered” to flood every year @nenshi ?

I live in Calgary southwest and often use the Glenmore Trail and MacLeod Trail interchange (SPUI). I would like to have a chat with the engineers in-charge of the highway engineering of this interchange project.

Given the yearly (and multiple) flooding we have experienced at this interchange since opening, why should they be allowed to keep their iron rings?! You see, flooding on a highway, especially in a section where drivers can’t really see the water clearly until it is too late, can be seriously dangerous.

This interchange caused taxpayers multi-million dollars to build and lots of inconvenience during construction. I want to ask if the engineers want us to simply accept this major road to be flooded every year? For one, who are the engineers that did the original calculation/modelling for maximum stormwater flow? I have seen puddles of water (of varying sizes) accumulated on the Glenmore east bound exit to MacLeod Trail under different size of storm conditions. These puddles are enough to damage cars if they need to stop at the water.

In the mid-90s, I learned some important lessons from reading Henry Petroski’s “To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design“. In this case, may be the politicians (and engineers) can have a read of the book. They need to recognize the failures in the original engineering design and fix the interchange as soon as possible.

Alberta Premier & Calgary Mayor: i don’t know when but do you want to one day open up a newspaper and read this headline, “Five people from two families killed in accident after car stranded by flood at Glenmore interchange“? Any experienced lawyer will have strong and reasonable ground to include city of Calgary and province of Alberta in a law suit claiming negligence in highway engineering design.

Here are some text from Amazon about “To Engineer Is Human” (emphasis added)

“The moral of this book is that behind every great engineering success is a trail of often ignored (but frequently spectacular) engineering failures. Petroski covers many of the best known examples of well-intentioned but ultimately failed design in action — the galloping Tacoma Narrows Bridge (which you’ve probably seen tossing cars willy-nilly in the famous black-and-white footage), the collapse of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel walkways — and many lesser known but equally informative examples. The line of reasoning Petroski develops in this book were later formalized into his quasi-Darwinian model of technological evolution in The Evolution of Useful Things, but this book is arguably the more illuminating — and defintely the more enjoyable — of these two titles. Highly recommended.”