CBC asks what the city can do to mitigate flood damage and finds an expert who makes a case for sewers not being the answer.
An SPVM officer is said to have saved the life of an 80-year-old driver whose vehicle got stuck under an overpass during Sunday’s downpour.
Tennis star Eugenie Bouchard has announced she will retire after this summer’s tennis tournament at Jarry Park.
Education minister Bernard Drainville has backed down, and replaced $540 million he was to cut from the education budget.
Good. Now do higher ed. Maybe even bring in some vaccine researchers.
Montreal is already a biotech hub. They could be recruiting tons of highly paid people to the region, who would pay a lot in taxes, and also create lots of lower-paying jobs too. Unfortunately, the international language of science is English, and multinationals are not going to be doing cross-border research and meetings in French, especially if the goal is to lure people from the US.
Nicholas
We were a hub two decades ago, and the Charest government of that era was actively recruiting scientists by giving them breaks on income tax.
I guess somebody made him cry lol
The outcry and petition seemed to have worked, which is great, but their funding cuts still caused some damage and unnecessary overhead. Schools had already laid off support staff and eliminated jobs based on the proposed budget cuts before the school year ended.
@Meezly: did the outcry work? Education needed more funding before the $540 million cut was even announced. They announced the cut and there was outcry, so they restored the same amount. They added nothing and made it look like they were doing everyone a favour.
Experts say we need to go beyond sponge parks and turn Montreal into a sponge city if we want to avoid the periodic flooding of buildings and roads like we saw on Sunday.
« Les saillies de trottoir doivent toutes être drainantes, puis il faut utiliser les stationnements, les grands toits des édifices pour récupérer les eaux. Même les ruelles, qui représentent beaucoup d’espace, il faudrait dès que possible y arracher l’asphalte, casser le béton et remplir ça de verdure. »
Sounds good to me.
Designing our cities around the automobile has got to be the biggest mistake of the 20th century. Sigh.
“Biggest mistake of the 20th century” is a category with some stiff competition.
Tuesday’s farewell to Serge Fiori is covered fulsomely on the francophone side of our media. Brendan Kelly gives us a summary of the event not only as a funeral but as a kind of love‑in for old‑style Quebec nationalism.
I still have my Oui button from 1979.
Didn’t vote oui, in case you were wondering.
The incinerators used by the city to dispose of sewage residue often overshoot the limits the city itself has set.
It’s funny, I first read “the incinerators exceed the standards” with the (not intended) meaning of “better than required” and it took me a while to get to “the [stuff in the smoke] exceeds the standards” with the intended meaning of “there’s more pollution than allowed”.
Oh good point. I was roughly translating “dépasse périodiquement ses propres normes” and couldn’t quite get it down in English. Suggestions?
The smoke/pollution from the incinerators often exceeds the allowed maximums?
It was clear as I read it that what I understood was wrong, I just took time to figure out what was meant.
That said I don’t think it absolutely needs to be edited.
I read it in a positive manner as in the amount of pollution is less than the standards say it should be.
Tried again : )
By the latest estimate it will cost $10 billion to sort out access to the airport.
Not a single reporter will go into the institutionalized corruption involved in these projects.
And, as usual, if the estimate is $10B the final cost will be somewhere between $20B and $50B.
What a frustrating mess. Part of the solution lies not at Trudeau itself but on the south shore. I agree completely with La Press columnist Stéphanie Grammond that it’s time to end the exclusivity clause that confines international flights to Trudeau. It would be to the benefit of the metropolitan region as a whole to send some of the traffic not only in the air but on the ground as well to MET (Saint-Hubert) to ease the pressure at YUL and literally create space for more passenger options and competition among airlines. Aéroports de Montréal’s monopoly on international flights seems more and more untenable in the face of passenger projections. $10 Billion is a head spinning amount to spend on access and infrastructure at one airport when another, even closer to the city centre, sits underutilized with the potential to expand.
$10B+ for airport expansion. $10B+ for the trosième lien. Meanwhile every summer there’s catastrophic rain and wildfire smoke, and outdoor skating is basically a thing of the past in the dead of winter.
How much would a highway and rail connection to Mirabel have cost in 1975? Because if you add up how much we spent on making Dorval functional we can clearly see that……ah forget it.
A swimmer was seen in distress off Verdun beach on Tuesday evening, and police are now searching for his body.
The location shown in the photo is about half a kilometer downstream from the beach.Since I last commented on this issue the city has put up several big ugly grey signs near the beach that say it’s prohibited to swim when the beach is closed and to swim outside of the boundaries. I find this type of messaging very poor.
The signs should communicate the reality of the river’s power, not simply that it’s “not allowed”.
is “may have felt unwell while swimming” a euphemism for drunk?
CityNews says that he experienced a seizure although they don’t say how that was determined.
MarcG: I agree. If anything, a statement like that can be felt as a dare by some.
I just tooks a walk in that area and there were tons of reporters wandering around interviewing people and taking photos so expect more stories on this. I noticed that the city has also put up some of those temporary metal gates near the beach which regular people, including a large family having a picnic, were ignoring freely. They need to consult someone who understands human behavior ASAP.
People have always swam in areas along the river outside the designated zone and are unlikely to stop doing so. The area described in the article (which Marc points out, is not right at the beach) is also near the site of a growing homeless encampment along the water. Not sure if it’s connected.
I believes the designated swimming and beach area should be expanded, or a second one created. It gets incredibly packed on hot days.
Remember the Russian dude who used to swim across to Nun’s Island and back every day (same guy who used to hang around in NDG on his bike)? Those homeless folks with the big orange tent have a drumkit, and one of them has some wood building skills. It’s heartbreaking when people put all of that work into building a life only for the cops to come in one day and throw it all in the garbage.
Ephraim 19:56 on 2025-07-16 Permalink
In some countries they are using asphalt with no sand, so it’s porous. Others, like Germany are going back to using bricks on the roads, not only does it allow water to go through, but you don’t have to repave everything to fix it. You just pull out a few blocks and put in a few blocks. Costs more initially.
Nicholas 20:48 on 2025-07-16 Permalink
Ephraim, I’ve been told bricks here are just way more expensive because of our trucks. Over there you can have a few layers of soil/sand/crushed stone underneath and then lay bricks on, very cheap. As you say it’s easy to repair infrastructure underneath. The problem is heavy trucks. There they don’t have as many heavy trucks, or as heavy trucks, or those are limited to highways and industrial access roads. So they only put brick on local streets, where you can bring a box truck but not a 53′ one (tractor trailer/semi/big rig/18 wheeler). Here in North America it’s every truck’s god given right to go anywhere, and even if they’re banned from local streets they’re still allowed for deliveries (there you have to transfer everything into box trucks). And that is too heavy for the subsurface, so it sags and sinks, and it gets bumpy super fast. So here you have to put in a concrete base under the brick, defeating the cheap infrastructure repair benefit, and raising the cost significantly. You need to absolutely ban those large trucks for all purposes, no matter what, MEME POUR LIVRAISON/DEMENAGEMENT and fine them massively if they break the rules. And people just aren’t willing to do that. Maybe for alleys, that’s our best bet, and some pedestrian streets with alleys.
mare 23:24 on 2025-07-16 Permalink
@Nicolas I agree with you. Snow removal should also be done with cargo bikes and not those big ass semis. /s
Snow and ice are a big issue for brick streets. If bricks aren’t cemented in here they won’t survive many winters because of the violence unleashed upon them by snow plows and snow scrapers and also frost heaving (a virtually unknown phenomenon in Europe). It’s a whole street of potholes, ready to be released one by one.
DeWolf 00:56 on 2025-07-17 Permalink
Unfortunately the answer to many questions about why we can’t have certain nice things in public space here is snow clearance. It’s an incredibly brutal process. Even granite curbs and other stone surfaces are heavily damaged after just a few years when they’d last relatively unscathed for decades in other places.
I’m convinced there is a way to reform snow clearance so that it isn’t so destructive and wasteful (and expensive), but it would require a real paradigm shift in how we manage our public spaces.
DeWolf 01:01 on 2025-07-17 Permalink
But to expand on my thought, there’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit even without changing the way we deal with snow. There is no snow removal in most alleys so there’s no reason they should be paved in asphalt. My alley is an absolute sea of asphalt even though technically it is a ruelle verte (thanks to some very vocal residents who were militantly opposed to more greenery, for reasons I can’t fathom).
Jonathan 09:23 on 2025-07-17 Permalink
I just don’t understand why they still allow the draining from flat roofs to go directly in the sewer. There should be updated building and municipal codes that require the roofs be disconnected and funneled into permeable surface. Most boroughs already require a certain percentage of a lot be permeable, so these areas that can take water already exist in theory.
When you imagine every rain drop that falls on a road or a roof goes into a drain which then passes through the treatment plant in the east end… It’s just a crazy amount of water and no sewage system can handle it ever. That’s what giant rivers like the st Lawrence River can only handle.
Kevin 10:58 on 2025-07-17 Permalink
@DeWolf
Do they have garages or parking in their backyards? My back alley is mostly unpaved, but at my end it’s paved because 6 houses have back alley driveways and garages, and for some places (like mine) the only way to access the furnace room or install a hot water tank is through the back alley.
@Jonathan
That may theoretically be possible for new construction, but it’s not even remotely possible for existing homes.
I have a flat roof and I can’t even conceive of how I’d divert the roof drain – which is in the centre of my building and ties into the main stack – to an outside wall for less than $100,000. I’d have to rip out a wall or two, jackhammer through a chimney-like-structure, then run a drain pipe under a floor and since going through 15 or 20 joists would be structurally unsound, lower the ceiling for several rooms by about 30 cms.
That’s never ever going to happen.
DeWolf 11:19 on 2025-07-17 Permalink
@Kevin Yes, but this wasn’t a plan to close the alley to cars, or to completely de-pave it. Just to add some trees and other greenery along the sides. The comité managed to do that along most of the alley and in those sections, it’s still wide enough to accommodate not just cars but even giant construction vehicles. It’s just that there was a group of residents who were militantly opposed to any sort of intervention whatsoever. Not coincidentally, the same people have hard-paved backyards with (at most) a few ornamental shrubs, and they make a point of dousing the sidewalks in herbicide every summer so there are absolutely no weeks poking up through the cracks. It’s ideological more than anything else.
Chris 15:21 on 2025-07-17 Permalink
My roof is also flat, and the pipe goes down the centre of the home to the basement. The building has neighbours attached on two sides. To make the pipe go outside, and be only gravity powered, would be a crazy impossible/expensive reno.
One possibility though would be to store such water in a tank in the basement and use it as grey water to flush toilets, or release to the sewer system slowly, on dry days.
Andrew 16:16 on 2025-07-17 Permalink
It doesn’t apply to individual homes, but bigger buildings have flow limiters where their drain connects to the city storm drain. So if you have a crazy rainfall over 5 minutes, they retain water on the roof or in the parking lot that drains slower over a long period to avoid overwhelming the system.
Jonathan 19:58 on 2025-07-17 Permalink
Re: my comment on the flat roof drain, I have a flat roof and recently replaced it, including the trusses and all. The roof originally had a space of 3’9″. The new roof design, with a less dramatic slope allowed the new roof space to only be 2’10”. I think a diverted drain pipe with an overflow gasket that drains into the main stack could fit in a space of 11 inches no problem. If there was a subsidy for this, I probably would have considered it and would likely not have increased the overall cost of replacing the roof by a high amount.
Ephraim 21:45 on 2025-07-17 Permalink
Just out of curiosity, Duluth is paved with bricks from St Lawrence to St. Denis. So, there must be a way to do it, no?
Kate 09:54 on 2025-07-18 Permalink
Ephraim, I used to live near Duluth, and the local lore was that the city had paved it with driveway quality pavers, not meant to be driven over heavily. By the time I left the neighbourhood, there were asphalt patches all over the place to replace the broken bricks.
The story may be true, because I’ve also heard that it was initially the plan to make Duluth into a pedestrian passageway all the way from Jeanne‑Mance Park to Lafontaine Park, so they were not expecting it to carry much motor traffic – maybe only delivery vans and emergency vehicles. But as we know, that didn’t happen.
Ian 18:09 on 2025-07-18 Permalink
Last year there was dead squirrel that ended up in one of the potholes on my street, the crows dragged it there for safekeeping after it had been initially picked over. When the city came by to fill potholes thay just filled in the hole with the squirrel in it – which I thought lazy at the time – but perhaps they are experimenting with squirrel-based water absorption.