Close call on water supply in 2019

Summer 2019, a major water main beside the Ville-Marie was on the brink of exploding – not collapsing, but actually exploding, given the pressure it sustains. The orange line, the Ville-Marie, and nearby Little Burgundy would all have been flooded.

It’s interesting to know that the city’s reservoirs contain 16 hours’ worth of water, and then they run dry. Emergency warnings would’ve gone out to reduce water usage and industrial consumers told to halt operations, but that would only have eked out a few extra hours.

We were lucky – it got fixed. But the cause here is the same reason the old Champlain didn’t last. Salt from the road seeped in and weakened the structure far faster than city engineers expected.

Good story.