A major piece of water pipe was installed Tuesday on Atwater Avenue. The pipe is a key link between the Atwater filtration plant and the McTavish reservoir — so critical that the repair is the reason Montrealers have been asked to reduce their water consumption this summer. The city says the work is halfway done. One of the sections of pipe that needed to be replaced is from the 1980s. Each one of the pipes is 48 inches in diameter and the city says they are complicated to replace. “It’s old infrastructure. It could be that there are surprises that I would not want to have happen,” said Alan De Sousa, the executive committee member responsible for infrastructure. “This pipe has been inspected many, many, many times. But the ability of our technology to do monitoring in real time has allowed us to identify this pipe as being one that if we didn’t do something, it would pop.” Situations like the burst pipe on Notre-Dame Street in 2024 are what the administration is trying to avoid. According to the city, each Montrealer uses about 306 litres of water a day. The most common uses are bathing, flushing the toilet, and laundry. With pools and lawn care, consumption usually peaks in the summer to 1.6 billion litres per day. But the city says Montrealers have been listening — on Monday, it was at 1.2 billion litres. “To date, Mother Nature has been helpful, and I want to thank her profusely for her help on this one,” De Sousa said, adding that the situation could change if there is another heat wave. And as for when the taps can be fully turned back on, he says: “If i was to give you a date, you’d be the first to kind of knock on my door when the day’s not been met. and I still don’t know.” A portion of Atwater near the Lionel Groulx metro station is down to one lane during the repairs. The expectation is the work will last until early September. The final but largest section of the repair starts on Monday.
