ANCIENT AQUEDUCT

SHOPS OF ANCIENT AQUEDUCT

The story of the water supply would be inadequate without an account of the great drought that fell upon the city in the last weeks of 1913, caused by a break in the concrete conduit which occurred after dark on Christmas night. For 193 hours the city was without an adequate water supply. It was in great alarm lest a typhoid epidemic or fires should start. Luckily fires were few, but one on St. Louis Square occurred when the want of water caused a whole block to be burned down. The city authorities had water carried round in the water carts and distributed to the people, who besides this scanty service had to melt the snow, then abundant, for culinary purposes. The danger of typhoid was averted by careful attention of the people to the directions of the city health officers and other physicians. The event caused great excitement and much criticism. As a warning note of the dangers that may befall a modern city, the following adapted account, published at the time, is chronicled here.[4]

Montreal’s 193-hour water famine, it is hoped, has passed and gone, but that a city of its size should be so absolutely thrown out of gear by the bursting of a single water conduit was such a shock to the citizens, that they will want the facts of the case to go down to posterity engraved in tables of stone—or concrete.

Shortly after dark on the evening of December 25th, a break nearly sixty feet long appeared in the water supply conduit at a point directly behind the Protestant Hospital for the Insane, on La Salle road. It was claimed the cause of the breakage was the digging away of the earth surrounding the conduit on the one side, adjacent to the old aqueduct, and the piling of it up on the other side, in connection with the widening of the old channel.

It is stated that the pipe was thus caused to sag, crack and eventually under the water pressure to break.

The rush of water carried away most of the earth left between the conduit and the aqueduct, and it was into the latter, fortunately, that the water flowed. If there can be a fortunate side to the accident, it is that it occurred where it did, within a couple of rods of the shack used by the construction company, whose men were at work on the aqueduct, and where there was a telephone, which greatly facilitated the ordering of supplies and men.