City of Montreal investigating cause of major water main break

The city of Montreal is conducting an emergency inspection of the water main pipe that burst open almost two weeks ago to determine the cause of the break and to inspect more of the pipe to evaluate its current state. 

“We’re inspecting right now 2.6 kilometers of the pipe that broke, including where it broke, so that we see what the result, why it broke, and to see what the state of the pipe is,” said Maja Vodanovic, the Lachine borough mayor responsible for water for Montreal’s Executive Committee.

A remote controlled robot is being used to assess the damage.

“When the robot navigates through the pipe, we are looking for wire breaks,” said Serge-Martin Paul, head of water service for the city of Montreal, adding, “there’s a transmitter on one end of the robot and we have a receiver. And the signal travels through the wires and if we have a distortion in the signal we know that we have wire breaks.” 

“This was supposed to be done actually this week and next week we were supposed to inspect it on a regular basis, but unfortunately the pipe broke before the inspection was due,” said Vodanovic. 

On August 16th, a water main break occurred near the Jacques Cartier bridge east of downtown Montreal flooding the surrounding streets, homes, and businesses, and forcing a preventative boil water advisory for about 150,000 people. 

The emergency inspection of this water main is over three days. However, regular inspections of other water pipes are anticipated in the near future.

“We’ve also given a contract which is going to be given out at the next council meeting,” explained Vodanovic. “It’s going to be given out for $7 million for 54 kilometers. And this was already in the works. We do it every five, I think it’s every five, six years, we inspect the pipes. So it was, it was scheduled.” 

The city of Montreal says that the water main pipe that broke was supposed to last another 10 years. The results of this current inspection to determine the cause of the break should be known in a few weeks. 

“We will see why it broke. We still don’t know why, it’s a special segment that broke. Out of all the kilometers that we inspect, there was only, on this one, there was only two that were a bit weak. And they were supposed to last another 10 years, 10 to 15 years, but it broke beforehand. So we have to find out why.”