Bitter cold heightens construction woes for Mile End residents
Work to replace Jeanne-Mance Street's water pipes between Villeneuve and Mont Royal means no end of headaches
Noon is usually a busy time of day for Hà Restaurant, but with no water on Thursday, the Vietnamese-fusion restaurant was turning customers away.
The source of the problem is work being done on Jeanne-Mance Street between Mont-Royal and Villeneuve streets. The water pipes are being replaced, and the entire street has been dug up for months.
With the cold snap, the hoses that stretch from fire hydrants at both ends of the street and run along the sidewalks to supply water to each building have frozen.
"We came in in the morning, and we don't have any water," said Flore-Anne Ducharme, one of Hà Restaurant's owners.
Ducharme says she'd normally chalk it up to a one-time freeze due to colder-than-average weather, but the intermittent water supply has been a problem since the infrastructure work began in August.
"They've been cutting water on and off — even when the restaurant was open," she said.
Ducharme laughs after a city worker drops by to give her a notice saying the boil-water advisory in place since the last cut-off, earlier this week, has been lifted.
"That's great, if we had water," she said.
The restaurant has made numerous complaints to the city, to no avail.
'One just accepts it'
Residents are equally unhappy about the problems.
Temporary fences line the sidewalks on both sides of Jeanne-Mance Street, to prevent people from tumbling into the construction site. Slippery metal grates cover gaping holes in the sidewalks, and thick hoses snake along the sidewalks, running up through front yards to supply water to each household.
Longtime resident Wilbur Jonsson has accepted the troubles as par for the course for Montreal construction projects.
"There's no way they can deal with the problems without turning off the water occasionally. So one just accepts it," he said.
The 82-year-old retired McGill math professor does admit he had to solicit the help of a friend on neighbouring de l'Esplanade Avenue to supply water the last time the hoses froze, earlier this week. She brought him plastic bottles filled with fresh drinking water and filled a bucket with water, so he could flush the toilet.
First phase of work almost complete
The City of Montreal said the weather caused the temporary water-intake pipes to freeze, but residents only had to deal with the issue for a few hours.
It said those temporary pipes will be removed at the end of November, once phase one of the work on the street is completed.
While the city usually gives 48-hour warnings before cutting off a resident's water supply, it says the cuts in this case were short-term, made necessary so workers could remove the temporary pipes to replace them with new ones.
Work on phase two will begin in the spring.
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