Woman seeks $20,000 after pothole
A Montreal woman is going after the city for $20,000 after a pothole on Rosemont Boulevard ate her front bike wheel and flung her onto the ground, breaking her teeth and nose.
If you get hurt on city property you only have 15 days to file, but sometimes there’s restitution. A woman I know was running along the sidewalk on St‑Hubert in the evening a couple of years ago. City workers had put in metal studs to install some street furniture, but they’d left the job unfinished, with no cones or barriers marking off the area. My friend snagged her foot on one of them and fell sprawling on the ground. She was injured – hands, face, knees, general shock – and some of her clothes were ruined. She needed medical attention, lost work days. She made a claim and did get something, I think around $1,200, because despite being shaken up she had kept her head and made photos of the area to support the claim she fully intended to make.
Some notes on recourse from the city from Radio-Canada, in text and audio.
Chris 08:54 on 2019-07-26 Permalink
Report potholes to 311 by phone, web, or app. They do fill them quickly in fact!
Blork 10:08 on 2019-07-26 Permalink
A couple of months ago I was on the corner of Beaubien and St. Dominique and I saw a hole in the road. It was more like a crack a few feet long with a small portion that was about six inches wide. There was water coming out of it (more of an ooze than a gush) and it looked like it might be hollow under the asphalt, but it was hard to tell. (Sinkhole!)
I decided to report it via the web on my phone. It took at least ten minutes for me to find the right page, and after I submitted the report the impression was that someone might come by in a few days time. The antithesis of “urgent.” In the meantime, dozens of people just walked right by the oozing potential sinkhole without even noticing it. (Maybe 20% of people looked and kept walking; the rest didn’t even see it.)
Then I remembered 311, so I called them and reported a hole in the road with water coming out and a potential sinkhole. They said they’d send someone. I returned about 40 minutes later and there was one small cone over the hole. At least there was that. I guess they didn’t see it as a potential sinkhole.
Takeaways:
(1) People are oblivious. I think it could have been a fizzling bundle of dynamite and people still would have just walked past without noticing.
(2) Use 311.
Kate 13:31 on 2019-07-26 Permalink
I also called 311 when I saw clean water bubbling up out of a hole in the road, but didn’t happen to pass by later. The 311 people pass you to the voirie, and while the voirie guy sounded a little surprised to get a report from a random woman, it may have helped.
Ian 19:40 on 2019-07-26 Permalink
I’ve had great luck with 311 over potholes as long as hey are more than 6 inches across, the big problem always seems to be that they are at intersections which makes it unclear what borough they are in sometimes. There was a huge, deep one right at Querbes and Jean Talon that got me passed around in circles over the winter.