Since last Thursday, Ali Mousavi-Torbati has had no running water at his Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG) apartment.
“It’s been almost five days. It’s kind of ridiculous that it’s like that,” he said.
He’s not alone. Water is cut off to the entire 40-unit building at the corner of Girouard and Sherbrooke.
“It’s really frustrating. I can’t do dishes. I can’t shower in my apartment,” said Ashley Paradis, another resident there.
A pipe broke under Girouard on Thursday, but because there’s so much traffic there, the city decided to wait until the weekend to fix it.
“They knew about it on Thursday, but decided not to do it on Friday and wait until Saturday,” said NDG city councilor Peter McQueen.
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Mousavi-Torbati feels the city left residents of his building high and dry.
“They made a choice. ‘How many people are we going to make angry? Forty or hundreds?’ I think it came down to that,” he said.
In the meantime, the city provided residents with bottled water. A crew came on Saturday, dug a hole, and thought the problem was fixed, but a new problem emerged.
“There’s no water pressure in our building,” said Paradis. “It lasts a minute if you’re lucky.”
“Some water comes out, then a trickle, then it just shuts off completely,” said Mousavi-Torbati.
Their landlord called and told the city there was still a problem, but told Global News he had to convince 30 different city workers there was still an issue with the municipal pipes. City officials thought the problem was in the building itself.
“Now they ascertained it was in the street portion and they’re about to dig,” said McQueen.
He said the work would begin Tuesday night.
“They’re going to tear up the street again and try to fix it,” McQueen said.
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“It’s kind of frustrating,” said Paradis. “I’d like to think they were on top of it and that they’d fix it before it gets to this point.
Water infrastructure is aging all over the city.
“Maybe we should dig up all the pipes at the same time, but it’s just not possible,” McQueen said.
Residents of the building on Girouard just want their water back, and still don’t know exactly when that will happen.