The heat wave remains the top headline and every article has advice on what to do.
Updates from June, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
McGill has suspended negotiations with those in the pro‑Palestine encampment.
Notes from Ted Rutland.
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Kate
A driver who hit and killed two men on New Year, then fled the scene, pleaded guilty Tuesday and faces seven years in prison and a driving ban going beyond that.
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Kate
Tuesday, a Hydro-Quebec honcho writes in Le Devoir to defend the electrical substation planned on the same block as the Grande bibliothèque. She makes a good case for the need to strengthen the grid in the area but her promises to maintain a certain aesthetic quality have to be taken with a grain of salt.
The Journal reports on a push by a group from the cultural community to stop the project. None of them addresses the technical issues that are the main topic of the Le Devoir piece.
Ephraim
It would be nice of Hydro Quebec build these stations to sort of blend in to the neighbourhood. Like this substation in Toronto… https://maps.app.goo.gl/Cj8KDotJu16PJY7f6 so that it essentially disappears. This is done in many places around the world. There is another at 640 Millwood Rd in Toronto.
dhomas
That substation in Toronto was built in 1910, according to the plaque on the building. This used to be done in Montreal, too. Looks at the Poste Adélard-Godbout in Old Montreal, built around the same era:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poste_Ad%C3%A9lard-GodboutUnfortunately, I don’t think we’ll get these marvels of architecture anymore. It’s simply too costly. 🙁
Ephraim
We need to demand more from the utilities to get their permits.
Ian
Well see that’s the thing, Hydro Quebec is seen as a nationlaist project, and disputing its supremacy is the top-tier politico verion of saying French is in decline for the proles. Much hand-wringing, shock, and expressions of frank grief.
dhomas
@Ephraim I just looked at the Millwood Rd installation. That’s a very cool idea! It seems they were doing it in Toronto after WWII, but I don’t know how long they kept building them this way or if they still do.
https://spacing.ca/toronto/2015/02/18/transformer-next-door/Ephraim
@Ian – They have so much of a surplus that it’s going to the Generations fund. They can afford to give a little less to the generations fund and a little more to making the city fabric have no tears.
@dhomas Many cities demand it. So does Paris and London. 145 Rue Lafayette in Paris, Leinster Gardens False Facades in London,
Kate
Rabbit hole warning: Wikipedia list of fake buildings.
Ian
@Ephraim for now, big-business-brain Legault put us on the hook to NY and now we have to buy power when there’s a dip.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/03/business/energy-environment/canada-hydropower-electric-grids.html
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Kate
There’s a pattern with big municipal projects – they tend to work out as twice as expensive and take twice as long as first projected. Listed here are the sewage ozonation plant, two composting plants, and the Bellechasse bus garage, plus the recently reopened city hall. The article considers others as well.
Isn’t the central problem a tendency to underestimate the scope and cost at the start, in order to get it accepted? Maybe we could stop doing that?
mare
If it was twice as expensive and still was finished at the same date that would be suspicious. Twice as expensive and finished much earlier is possible (weather, hiring extra staff, using faster but more expensive production methods), and taking twice as long and being much more expensive is actually not so strange. There’s always feature creep and setbacks, and you have to pay workers for all the extra time they need to do the extra work.
Blork
@mare, that’s true enough, and could be used as a reasonable defence if they projects only occasionally went overboard like that. But they almost always do. It’s systemic, and therefore most likely corrupt, at least corrupt to the point where nobody believes the initial estimates and everyone knows they are way undervalued in both time and cost, but that’s the system. It’s essentially bait-and-switch on a billion dollar level, done over and over again.
P
I understand the cost of labor overages. If it took longer than expected, then it’s reasonable that it’ll cost a good bit to pay people to show up for the extra time.
But when something goes from 1 billion to 2 billion… And from one year to two years… How much of that extra billion went into paying humans?
At a yearly salary of 100k, you could pay 10,000 workers with a billion dollars. Obviously it’s a hypothetical, but these cost overruns are clearly not going primarily toward the cost of the man power.
So what is it? Materials? How does the contractor get away with that? Is the city so weak that they enter into contracts where it’s agreed they’ll pay X for Y to be built… But then halfway through the project, the contractor just says “Oh by the way, it’s gonna cost 2X now, so pay up.”?
Ian
It’s because of the rule that they have to accept the lowest bid.
Everyone in the industry(ies) – and frankly, the city – understands that a formal bid is the bare bones under optimal conditions. Something always comes up. It’s just a shibboleth at this point.
Kevin
The lowest bid assumes perfect conditions on virgin ground.
The lowest bid doesnt take into account the kludges, the hodgepodge of repairs, the blueprints from the past bearing no resemblance to reality.
And the cost overruns affect private companies too—we just don’t hear about them because nobody who is willing to talk to the press digs into their spending that closely.
For instance, a few years back a phone company started digging up an alley in my neighborhood to upgrade a line. A man in his nineties walked out and told the crew the plans were wrong, the line was in a different spot, because there was a giant boulder underground. After a day of fruitless digging, and bringing in bigger and bigger equipment, the crew finally listened to the old man, who was right– and by this point a one hour job took three days and needed the added expense of repaving a lot of the alley.
su 08:36 on 2024-06-19 Permalink
I was thinking this heatwave is a big hullaballoo about a 2 day anomalie until I checked longterm historical norms for our location: https://climate.weather.gc.ca/climate_normals/index_e.html
MarcG 09:22 on 2024-06-19 Permalink
Outdoor air quality is kinda trash, too. Here’s a local organization associated with QPIRG Concordia that distrubutes free masks.
Mark 09:45 on 2024-06-19 Permalink
There are some interesting trends going on in weather reporting. On one hand, we have the media that needs to create buzz for stories and tried to pick up on every possible “exciting” event to draw clicks. On the other hand, the climate is actually changing. but gradual changes don’t generate as much buzz as “deadly heat dome” or “class 3 kill storm” (thanks simpsons for that one). Mind you, it looks like the the changes are not going to be so gradual after all, and we might have a closer correlation between weather and climate sooner than later.
Funny enough, Meteomedia’s site had the following headline on Monday “la prochaine canicule, du jamais vu depuis des décennies”. So I clicked on the article hoping to see the records that we would be breaking (earliest heatwave?) but nothing in the article spoke about what was so special…like no mention why this heatwave would be unlike anything we’ve seen since the 80s or 90s. I guess the weather network doesn’t have to abide by the same journalistic standards as other media?
Kate 15:35 on 2024-06-19 Permalink
The regular media have been making the most of the shock value of projected windchill and humidex values a lot in recent years, too.
Mozai 02:24 on 2024-06-20 Permalink
Mark if you want to see what records are broken, there’s a blessed obsessive person posting to reddit in /r/MontrealWxRecords . “With a forecast humidex of 41, [june 18] could be Montréal’s muggiest spring day in more than 20 years, since Jun 7th, 1999.”
Mark 14:18 on 2024-06-20 Permalink
Thanks yeah I’ve been seeing his posts. What I found surprising was that there wasn’t any mention of any record being broken in the article on the meteomedia site, despite the alarmist title suggesting otherwise. Obviously, this is a really early heatwave. But I guess the media has to compete with social media tactics to draw people in, aka “these 10 common household items are deadly…click here to find out more”…Wondering how much worse it will get with the rapid expansion of AI and likelihood of the “dead internet theory”