A couple of weeks ago, on August 13th, a major water main broke in my neighbourhood, Saint-Henri, a few blocks from where I live. We first noticed that the water pressure was low at around 11 in the morning, and when I changed the cats’ water, I noticed that the water was coming out a bit brown. Now, I’m used to this; on our stretch of Saint-Jacques, we have a couple of smaller leaks or breaks a year, it seems. Once it broke in the winter, and the street got covered in ice. They had to send big scrapers to scrape away the ice every few hours, until they could find the source of the leak and fix it. Over 900 water mains break every year in Montreal!
Here’s one that happened also not too far, just a month earlier.
And this one happened just a couple days later.
And another one happened just yesterday on Notre-Dame and Rose de Lima. I can’t find anything in the news about it though, I guess it wasn’t large enough, ha! Here’s a picture of the street this afternoon; they’ve finished fixing it, and I guess they’ll re-pave it tomorrow:
Anyway, the pipe that burst on Saint-Antoine was a 76cm pipe, so, not a small one! Have a look at this gusher:
Some of the theories I read say that they were caused by some work happening elsewhere which increased the water pressure in the mains in my area, and since a lot of the pipes are so old (some are even a century old or more), they just couldn’t deal with the increase in pressure. I’m obviously no engineer, but this sounds plausible to me. When they’ve dug up the road on my street, I’ve seen how some of the pipes are just crumbling.
So, here are some pictures that I took last week, a week after the original breakage:
And here are some pictures I took today:
What a mess. Apparently it won’t even be fixed until the end of this week, as they have to do some work on some parts to get them to fit together properly. Not fun at all. School starts this week, and with school, extra traffic. Our kids’ school bus will have some long detours because of this. Can’t wait for it to be fixed!
Richardmtl 
