How Montreal's response to water main breaks stacks up

The way the city of Montreal reacts to water main breaks is much more complicated than how other cities manage their response.

Compared with Toronto, Ottawa and Laval, Montreal has additional layers of bureaucracy that can lead to additional hours of flooding and, ultimately, moredamage, a CBC investigation found.

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It's also the only city of the four that doesn't staff a specialized crew to turn off the valves and repair larger pipes on Fridays.

Take a look at how each city is staffed to manage emergency water main breaks:

How Montreal responds

The first responder is always the borough's water main crew. In most cases, it can handle smaller breaks.

In the case of larger breaks involving water pipes more than 16 inches in diameter, the borough is required to call the city's chief engineer. The engineer verifies what valves need to be closed to stop the water.

On the island of Montreal, only seven of the 19 boroughs have both the equipment and training to close those valves.

• Plateau-Mont-Royal(all diameters)
• Sud-Ouest (all diameters)
• Lachine (up to 36")
• St-Laurent (up to 48")
• Rivire-des-PrairiesPointe-aux-Trembles(all diameters)
• Ahuntsic-Cartierville (up to 48")
• Hochelaga-Maisonneuve(all diameters)

• See a larger version of this map

If the borough doesn't have its own equipment, or the break is more complex, the city's water department is called in.

The city's maintenance and valve team is made up of 33 blue-collar workers.

They have the equipment and training to close valves of any size. This team, as per their collective agreement, only works Monday to Thursday, 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The rest of the time, they are on-call.

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Montreal is more complicated than other cities because it has both borough-based water crews and a central city crew.

In other cities, there are crews per district, but it's all centralized by the main water department.

Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre said improvements are always being made, but he thinks the city is doing a better job of getting rid of silos.

"In the past, you had the sidewalks who were doing their job and then the water and then the water management and then the infrastructure," said Coderre.

"Now everyone is talking to one another."

But Projet Montreal leader Luc Ferrandez says the work is stillfar from centralized. Just getting an engineer to sign off on the right water shutdown plan can take hours, especially when the call comes in after hours.

"Interruption plans should be availablewithin one hour," said Ferrandez.

"Either have the employee available, on a pager, that's able to access the network mapping from home, or he's at work, it's one or the other."

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