(Visit) Exciting Montreal (With Caution)
Montreal is said to be the most cosmopolitan of Canadian cities. It's entirely possible that Toronto has now begun to creep up to contest that title, given its much wider inclusiveness of immigrants from around the Globe. Both cities can lay claim to be distinguished, exciting and interesting places to live in - or to visit. There is much to be seen and to be admired in both metropolitan areas. Although admittedly, Montreal has a slight advantage in historical background and in its architecture.There are other things that make Montreal more interesting. The kind of interesting encapsulated in that old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times". In that recent events have made residents uneasy and very attuned to their environment, architecturally speaking. Montreal, quite clearly, is facing a huge problem of ageing infrastructure. One which, several years earlier, Saeed Mirza, professor emeritus of civil engineering at Montreal's McGill University warned of.
He pointed to a wicked combination of 1960s and 70s shoddy construction standards, along with inadequate maintenance that has created a structural deficit he likens to a dread disease. "If you ignore it, as we have done in Quebec, it just grows like that cancer. Then comes the stage when the cancer has spread so much, it is fatal. It's exactly the same with our infrastructure. If we go on being negligent, there will be so much deterioration that we cannot fix it."
There have been some horrific structural collapses in Montreal that have claimed lives of people simply going about their normal everyday activities. A commission of enquiry pinpointed the fact that Quebec lagged behind the rest of North America in maintaining bridges and overpasses, finding that 46% of the province's bridges required replacement or repair within a five-year space.
The city's Olympic Stadium, that problem-plagued structure that haunted Montreal long after the 1976 Summer Olympics concluded, saw a 55-tonne concrete beam crash onto a walkway in 1991. Fortunately, no one was hurt. But it is a sobering realization that this could have killed quite a few people had they been standing in the wrong place at the right time.
One man was killed in the Montreal suburb of Laval in 2000, when an overpass under construction fell onto the highway below, because beams had not been installed properly. Five people were killed in 2006, when the de la Concorde overpass in Laval, dating from the early 1970s, collapsed. At the time Gilles Vaillancourt, mayor of Laval was quoted as saying: "Every time I drove downtown when the traffic was stopping, I made sure I wasn't stopping my car under a bridge."
Breathtaking, isn't it, when a municipal politician is clear that he was aware that his city was full of unsafe structures. Do they not communicate with their provincial counterparts? Quebec is a province that is well known to be concerned for Everyman. The province has funded inexpensive, subsidized day care, and public dental services, but it sells short the necessity to maintain its critical urban infrastructure.
The Grande Bibliotheque in Montreal has been the source of over a dozen glass panels falling from its facade - and it was opened in 2005 - forcing the library to install a barrier to protect people from falling glass, around the circumference of the building. One man was trapped in his car and died in north-end Montreal, when a parking garage built in 1970 collapsed.
A woman celebrating her birthday at a downtown highrise hotel's eatery was killed when she was struck by a piece of concrete that broke away from a higher story, two weeks ago. Following that incident a construction worker was hit by crumbling concrete falling from a dilapidated overpass.
Montrealers have become ultra-alert, careful where they seat themselves on outside patios with concrete overhangs. Commuters speed up when they reach critical overpasses and underpasses to reduce their time in transit over those suspected crumbling infrastructures. It is most certainly exciting.
Why aren't they rising up en masse, and demanding rectification of this dire situation? Why aren't we all, actually, since similar situations are being identified elsewhere as well, (albeit not to the extent that has occurred in Montreal). We just love living in interesting times, obviously.
Labels: Canada, Environment, Troublespots
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 01, 2009
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