UTILIZED SOFTWARE 

GeoStudio, Leapfrog, OpenGround, PLAXIS, ProjectWise

LOCATION 

Canada

ORGANIZATION/COMPANY 

Stantec Consulting Ltd.

After the 2013 floods left Calgary with roughly $6 billion in losses, the question was no longer whether the city needed protection, but how quickly it could be built. The answer took the form of the Springbank Off-stream Reservoir — a 29-meter-high zoned dam and a 70.2 million cubic meter dry storage basin on the Elbow River, designed by Stantec Consulting Ltd. and delivered against an unforgiving May 2025 operational deadline.

The engineering challenge was unusually stubborn: a tall embankment founded on highly compressible clay, borrow soils of widely varying quality, and legacy tools that fragmented data across disconnected systems. Stantec replaced that fragmentation with a connected workflow. Subsurface data was centralized in OpenGround as a single source of truth, fed live into Leapfrog Works and Leapfrog Central for dynamic 3D geological modeling and version control, while PLAXIS staged-construction analysis and GeoStudio 3D slope-stability and seepage studies verified foundation behavior against field instrumentation — 75 piezometers, 8 inline extensometers and 4 settlement plates. ProjectWise held the collaboration and document control together.

The sustainability dividend came from precision. Better-informed drainage design cut aggregate consumption by 75%, saving about $1.5 million CAD and sparing the quarrying and haulage that volume implies. Real-time borrow suitability assessments allowed 6 million cubic meters of excavated soil to be reused on site, avoiding tens of millions in import costs and the emissions of moving material across the region. The project supported roughly 2,200 jobs at an estimated cost of $849.4 million CAD.

Most importantly, it opened on time — delivering an immediate 70% reduction in flood risk for 1.6 million residents against a 1-in-200-year event, while managed flows preserve the riparian ecosystems along the river it protects.