MONTREAL – A recently discovered cube of reinforced concrete buried underground is at the centre of roadwork slated to begin Tuesday that threatens to snarl traffic in NDG.
A second phase of construction on a water main aimed at clearing the block is slated to begin in the coming week. Workers began the original phase two months ago, slimming Decarie down to one lane and putting car traffic on the curb.
But the discovery of the block. which measures 20 metres cubed, has added six days to the work schedule.
“It’s awful,” said Normand Etienne, a trucker who uses Decarie Boulevard on a regular basis. “There’s going to be loss of time, it’s going to be incredible.”
The work will whittle southbound traffic on Decarie Boulevard to one lane between Snowdon and Cote St-Luc Road. It will also make Cote St-Luc Road east one lane across the expressway overpass, and prevent northbound Decarie Boulevard traffic from turning left on Cote St-Luc.
In the mind of drivers like Mustafa Kemal, “it can’t be possible. There’s big traffic on this road. I don’t know. I don’t know how we’re going to do this.”
When Global News covered the first phase of the work, the staff of one of the area’s oldest bars, Le Bievre, worried about the effect on business.
“Business hasn’t picked up since November,” said Lenia Macaroglu, a bartender at the business. “We don’t get a lot of clients anymore, and I guess with more construction coming it’s just going to get worse and worse.”
Another bartender, Indris Anglade, pointed to a virtually abandoned bar on a Friday afternoon.
“It’s dead. Like no customers at all,” she said.
Copeman said the work, which is scheduled to run from Tuesday to Jan. 18, will be inconvenient but vital.
“I don’t really have a solution other than to say this work has to be done,” he said. “We’ve taken every measure possible to mitigate the problem.”
Etienne, the trucker, had a slightly different take on the issue:
“It’s going to be hell, that’s it, nothing else to say.”
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