Montreal continued to clean up Monday after a major water main break flooded streets, paralyzed traffic, and forced emergency evacuations from water-logged buildings east of downtown right before the weekend.
“It was a big week,” Mayor Valérie Plante said in an update outside a construction zone in the morning, adding the city is “supporting citizens in its next steps.”
It’s still not clear what led the pipe near the Jacques Cartier bridge to burst — but local officials said it was among the city’s most “vulnerable” and had suffered corrosion over the years.
Chantal Morissette, director of Montreal’s water department, said the city noticed the two-metre-wide pipe was deteriorating during an inspection in 2017 or 2018. Another round of inspections was planned, she added.
“The pipe burst before we arrived so the corrosion was more intense than what we suspected during the investigation,” Morissette said.
The water main break turned into a dramatic geyser last Friday morning, with many waking up to firefighters urging them to leave their homes.
Plante said 50 buildings were flooded when millions of litres of water poured onto streets and 16 households have asked the Red Cross for emergency housing.
The mayor said workers were removing debris from roads in the area, but it will take time to get the parts to repair the pipe, which is two metres wide.
“We will have to wait for some of the pieces to arrive,” Plante said, adding more analysis needs to be done.
While the situation was far from ideal, Plante said it could have been worse. Other infrastructure projects in recent years helped ensure the eastern part of the city didn’t have drinking water fully cut off when the pipe burst.
The incident happened to come one week after Montreal was hit hard by the remnants of tropical storm Debby, which dumped more than 170 millimetres of rain on some parts of the island. The record rainfall led to water-logged homes and highways.
Debby’s deluge on Aug. 9 flooded 3,300 private buildings and about 60 municipal buildings, Plante said.
“It was a difficult week for hundreds of Montrealers,” Plante said.
— with files from Global’s Dan Spector and The Canadian Press