MONTREAL — One day after a massive concrete slab slammed onto a major Montreal expressway, transport officials have knocked down another unstable beam in the same tunnel.
A 15-metre-long concrete slab dropped Sunday from the ceiling of a tunnel along the city’s downtown Ville-Marie expressway.
There were no injuries as the morning collapse came during a quiet period along the normally busy stretch of highway.
Transport officials later noticed another unsteady concrete beam in the tunnel and used a crane to rip it down.
A spokeswoman for the provincial Transport Department says workers are now trying to stabilize a third beam.
The Montreal area’s aging road network has forced lane closures on several overpasses and bridges this summer as engineers scramble to deal with the city’s crumbling infrastructure.
One longtime structural engineer says Montreal’s woes are an illustration for other Canadian cities of what could happen when a municipality doesn’t have a solid maintenance plan in place — from the very beginning.
Saeed Mirza made those remarks Monday, a day after part of a major Montreal expressway tunnel collapsed under the city’s downtown core.
“It’s like a cancer in a human being: if you catch it in time, it will be OK, but if you don’t it will spread,” said Mirza, a professor emeritus of civil engineering at McGill University.
“What I would like to say to the government is: if you cannot maintain it, do not build it.”
The aging road network in the Montreal area has forced lane closures on several overpasses and bridges this summer, as engineers scramble to deal with the city’s crumbling infrastructure.
The closed routes have resulted in traffic-congestion nightmares across the city amid fears that simply maintaining the network, now, will be prohibitively expensive.
Transport officials shut down the Ville-Marie expressway Sunday morning after a 15-metre-long concrete slab broke free and slammed onto the road below.
There were no injuries as the morning collapse came during a quiet period along the normally busy stretch of highway — where an average of 100,000 vehicles roll by every weekday.
Inspectors with the provincial Transport Department later noticed another unsteady concrete beam in the same tunnel and used a crane to rip it down. A spokeswoman for the department said Monday that workers are now trying to stabilize a third beam.
Amid pressure from opposition politicians, the Quebec government also released Monday a pair of engineering inspection reports conducted on the expressway in 2008 and 2010.
The falling concrete has brought back fears triggered by the 2006 collapse of a highway overpass in the neighbouring city of Laval — an incident that killed five people and injured several more.
Mirza said Montreal’s problems stand out among Canadian cities because the city experienced a building boom during the 1960s and 70s, just ahead of Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympics.
“We built extensively and in a hurry and the result was that we did not have the same quality control on them as should have been exercised,” said Mirza, adding that much of the infrastructure now eroding at 40 years old should have lasted 75 to 100 years.
“Because of lack of quality control, the quality was poor and these are the results we’re seeing now.”
Mirza said the problem was compounded by budget cuts in the provincial transport ministry that targeted maintenance programs in the early 1980s.
A change in philosophy is also necessary in the field of civil engineering, he added.
He said engineers across North America are trained to build, but they must also learn to focus on implementing detailed maintenance plans for their projects — such as when parts must be replaced and when repairs will be needed.