Bricks! The old sewer spotted!

They haven't dug much deeper in the big hole on the south side of the street, but they did create a plywood box to protect the cables running across Clark street (and parallel to Mont-Royal).



What's really exciting, though, is if you look under the black pipes of cables running north-south, you can see a bit of orange colouring. At first I thought it was just the rusty pipe they had blocked off, but upon closer inspection, it was a semi-circle of neatly stacked bricks that was revealed!





I find that very exciting! It's like they've just peeled back the road to reveal a time capsule almost 100 years old. I really can't wait to see more of it. And look at the quality of the workmanship! That's a fucking brick tunnel built by hand not long after WWI (yes One) and it still looks totally solid. Very cool.

Some of the old valves leading into homes

In my last post, I pointed out how all of our houses were being fed water from aboveground hoses. That was the setup as of Friday (October 9th) morning.

But what's weird is that on Thursday, they were re-digging out a bunch of the sidewalk squares where the household valves were and digging them really deep, much deeper than the first time. Below, I'll post some of the pictures. I wonder if whatever they discovered here was what made them decide to go with the hoses?





It's been really wet for the last week and after the machine got down to a certain depth, the men had to go in and dig with a shovel. It was pretty muddy and they had a pump set up on one of them to push the water out.

Here's a close up of two valves going into one of the apartment blocks at the south side of our block.



And here is a big thick complex pipe structure that I guess is bringing water into the commercial building here. This is on the other side of the street than ours (where they aren't using the aboveground hoses).



I think if you are confused by the end of this post, then I am probably accurately reflecting my own state of mind. I know real life is rarely neat and engineering jobs often reflect this, but there seems to be so many different ways of getting the water into the houses that I just can't make head or tail of it. I've been busy at work this week so haven't had the time to talk to any of the workers. I suspect they won't be around this weekend (especially since it's a long one), so expect the ignorance to remain for the time being.

I will post this final image, of a worker lollygagging, chatting up local young women!



Actually, this guy is a pretty hard worker and is one of the guys who has been quite friendly about explaining stuff. He was further protecting the trees, strapping them with 2x4s and this young Montreal woman stopped to ask him some questions just as I was heading back up my front stairs. A much deserved break for a working man!

One pipe forward two hoses back?

Okay, now what the hell? I get up this morning and this is what I see looking down from my front porch:



In the upper right hand corner you can see that it originates in the temporary pipe, which is exposed in an unfilled section of the gutter.



And runs to the little boarded window that leads to the crawlspace of our building, where I had noticed earlier last week that it looked like someone had added a valve to. I didn't have a chance to talk to my downstairs neighbour about it.



And then looking up and down the block, it appears that every single house on our side of the street has these crazy hoses attached to them.



What the hell? What was the point of digging up the sidewalk and unearthing the main valves to each of our houses? Have they not actually attached anything down there? Were they dug up for the future when the proper aqueduct is in place? This setup strikes me as very sketchy. All of our water is going to be supplied by a bunch of garden hoses just laying out in the street for anyone to trip over, cut, inject LSD into?

This job started out quite strong, but it's starting to get that old Montreal air about it. I think a call to mr. Fillip Foti is in order.

It's On! (or off?)

So work has basically stopped in the first half of this week. The only excitement was the rumour that our mail was no longer being delivered. One of my neighbours went to our local post office (5 minutes by bike) to see why she hadn't gotten her mail for the last couple of days. They told her that it was probably because our street was too dangerous for the mailman and that she would have to go to the larger branch up on Jean-Talon (20 minutes by bike) to collect her mail, which she did.

I really, really, really found this hard to believe. We are all safely making it out of our homes to work or wherever. People are walking their dogs all over the street. I was extremely excited about a ripping investigation into the lameness of Canada Post. Was it a union rule or was our guy just really wimpy? I had visions of myself politely and steadfastly making my way up the Canada Post chain of command, hiding in the bushes to confront our mailman once I found out the rest of his route, caught between being outraged and sympathetic to a guy and his job. Then yesterday our mail came. So who knows what the truth was. Maybe at first he thought it was too dangerous. The thing is, there was no warning, no note saying that we should go to some other branch to pick up our mail. According to my neighbour, the people at the post office told her there wouldn't be one, because the mailman had no way of delivering it! It's really too good to be true.

I suspect the construction work has stopped because we are all waiting for the results of the tests on the quality of the water in the temporary pipes. Happily, shoved into our mail slot yesterday was the following note:



Basically saying that our water would be turned off sometime between 6 and 10 this morning and that we should run our new water for a little while before using it. I didn't notice any change during breakfast and the street was quiet, so I suspect they haven't started yet. If I have time, I'll swing by over lunch and see what happened. I heard a minor horror story from a friend in Toronto whose water was out for several days recently during similar work done over there. Extra fun when you have an infant and a new born baby in the house!

I'm also excited to have the phone number of the head of the project, M. Filippo Foti. Let's hope he will be as helpful as the people on the ground have been with my questions.

The Big Hole getting dug up

So here is what it looks like near the end of the work day on Monday. It's a big rectangle, but it looks like the deep part is in the middle of the intersection. The big wooden fence is on the southside. You can see the cables that they are leaving intact here. I'm guessing those are power and data? I'll ask when I get a chance.



This is looking up my block, roughly to the north.


This is the other side of the fence, looking west towards the mountain (Mont Royal). I've never seen a view-blocking wall like this before when they are opening up the streets. Usually, they leave their giant holes open for everyone to see.



And this is looking at it as if you were driving from the south up Clark street. Road blocked sucker! They should really put some sweet graffiti murals on that plywood.


I'm really impressed by the size of the scoop, so I'll just show another picture with it next to the guys on the ground. It could literally scoop one of them up easily.


Lots of people love watching construction.



These are just some bonus pictures of a bunch of old pipes pulled out from farther up. I don't know what their original use was, but I suspect they were the old connectors between the main aqueduct and various people's houses.


Here's a close-up of one of the old valve caps. It's about 8" wide.


I looked up the name of that company on the web and could find very little information, but I did stumble upon this cool website: The Canadian Fire Hydrant and Waterworks Museum. It appears to be only in virtual form, but I guess the guy keeps all this stuff on his property in Southern Ontario. I contacted him and asked if he was interested in the valve cover, which he was, so maybe it will find a good home. He wanted to know if they had gotten rid of any fire hydrants, but no such luck. I would definitely have been on top of that! I'm sure those things weight a ton, but that's what the hand truck is for!

The Big Hole

So there was no work over the weekend, and the neighbours quietly took advantage and snuck their cars in. By Sunday, the street was half full of parked cars, though they were all gone early Monday morning.

At the bottom of our street, the south side, jutting right out into Mont-royal, is where they are going to dig the really big hole. According to the inspector, it's going to be 8 metres deep. They've already cut the starting slices and built a wall of 2x4's and plywood, to block people from coming into it. The wall is only on the south side, so I hope that we will have visual access for the duration of the work. The machine they are using on it is big!

Here is some sexy construction machinery porn for you! Amateur, too!






You can see the lattice of cuts made into the surface of the road. That job would be repetitive and boring but I can see a certain satisfaction in driving nice clean cuts like that into the road.

As I was taking pictures, my downstairs neighbour came by on her way home from work and shopping for the family. It's her awesome dog that I take out on walks. Here's a nice shot of Clark street benefitting from the lack of cars.



Finally, one of the holes near a larger commercial building on the corner revealed an awesome old valve.





Stay tuned as there is lots more to come, including a potential Canada Post scandal!

"Won't someone think of the trees!"

I'm going to drop the Day X prefixes at the beginning of these posts. They are a handy way of keeping these chronicles in order, but this project is going to last until some time in December and I'm not going to be reporting on every single day of action.

On Friday morning, not a whole lot of work was done. Someone dropped off a big roll of felt and a pallette of 2x4's and a bunch of trees were wrapped and protected.



I asked one of the workers why the trees were being wrapped and he went on a little mini-rant about how trees are more important than people to the city and that if we kill a tree, everybody freaks out, but if we kill a person nobody cares. It was done in that half-humourous half-aggressive way that construction workers always seem to have to behave. I said that that was as it should be, that there were too many people and not enough trees and he called me Mr. Schnitzel. When I asked him to repeat himself, as I didn't get what he was talking about, he said "you know, the guy who was worse than Hitler." "Do you mean Schindler?" "Yes, him!"

The inspector approached us at this point and the workers teased him about arriving late. I asked him about the trees. The reason I kept pressing about the trees is that they had already finished digging up the sidewalks next to the trees, so it seemed a bit late to be wrapping them up in protective 2x4's. The inspector admitted that they were supposed to have protected them at the beginning and that they had "gotten a reminder from the city".

The conversation then degenerated into complaining about the youth of today. This was a subject that we could all agree on, how lame they are. According to the workers, there are something around 6,000 skilled construction jobs available right now in Quebec and nobody to fill them. Considering that Quebec does have a pretty good trades education program and that those jobs are pretty secure and well-paying, it does seem strange that more young people aren't going in to fill the ranks. I'm sure it's not quit as simple as that, as there is probably a lot of union bullshit to go through. Their theory is that the kids just want to stay at home and play video games.

The final enticing thing I learned was that the original sewer pipe is made up of brick! I really hope that's the case and that we'll get to see it. Even sweeter would be some kind of souvenire, like an old plaque or something.

Sadly, as I was heading out to work this morning, I saw that one tree made the cut.



Looks perfectly healthy to me. I really would love to see the criteria for why a tree gets chopped down.