Decarie-Raimbault sewer excavation. Montreal, 1958

Here’s a little quote that I discovered the other day that I’m quite fond of.  Taken from the book City A-Z, which conveniently enough, can be browsed through online.

The sewers are the hidden underground beyond time. Unlike the carefully counted, quantified, rationalized into the time-space orders of the above-ground city, the sewers are the randomness of what is left over. These are mythic bowels of the city, repository of unacknowledged histories. This is where all sorts of family dirt ends up.

*Insert obligatory “sorry for the lack up updates” statement here*

A fresh post is coming up tomorrow and it’ll be far better than this one, I promise.

A brief article about my work  is in this week’ s issue of Hour Magazine. For those who don’t like to get newsprint on their fingers,  you can just read it online here.

I’ve also made some improvements to the Interactive Map section of this site. Hopefully the placemarks for the photos will be a bit more informative now. There are still quite a few more things I want to do with the map, including incorporating historical photos from the City’s archives and snippets of oral history. It’s just a matter of taking the time to figure out how to do it well.

Typical Montreal weather this summer.

Nothing like almost a month’s worth of overcast or rainy days to put a damper on underground exploring. Most days the precipitation never amounts to much, but the thread of a thunderstorm always seems to there on the horizon. I’ve been inside sewers and storm drains during showers in the past without running into any problems, but the weather’s been too unpredictable for me to want to try pushing my luck.

Hopefully the weather during August will be a bit more stable, but with more rain in the forecast over the rest of the week, it doesn’t appear as though things are going to be improving anytime soon.

In the meantime, here’s a selection of items found over the past few weeks which may be of some interest.

City needs to lead on water – or drown — An interesting little piece that talks a bit about the consequences of relying on a sewer system for drainage.

Montrealers Outraged After Sewage Flood — The type of story which seems to occur every summer in Montreal.

Transport Canada Blames Montreal for L’Acadie Circle Flood — I was able to see this area of Montreal flood over earlier last month during a particularly heavy rainstorm.  The claim by Transport Quebec’s spokesperson that the floods were caused by the 14-foot Meilleur Atlantique collector sewer reaching capacity seems a bit far-fetched. The problem likely lies with inadequate storm drainage connections leading into it.

Peeling Back Pavement to Expose Watery Havens — A great piece about “daylighting” buried waterways, in particular the Cheonggyecheon river in Seoul, Korea. A related NYT blog entry can be found here.

The Wetland Machines of Ayala — An example of one company that’s creating artificial wetlands to help treat wastewater in Israel.

Exboration.com — A new photoblog from Bryan of Toronto who’s been posting some top-notch underground photography.

Bresciaunderground.it — Amazing underground adventuring that’s been going on over the past few years in Northern Italy.

OK, so I’m back home now— and officially married. She said “yes” (*phew!*) and was then nice enough to humour me during some of my underground related antics during the week-long honeymoon in Istanbul. For eg: having to tag along with me as I entered just about every lighting store we came across to find a 24″ portable  flourescent unit. I look forward to being able to use it to light my shots, but I know it’s going to be a real pain to have to bring around with me. I might have to get Teri back underground to help me carry it.

One of Istanbul's many treasures.

And of course, with a week to spend wandering the streets of Istanbul, I inevitably began to wonder about its sewer system- especially in and around the older parts of the city. The manhole covers would often have ventilation holes large enough to be able look down through the shaft without having to crouch down. I was never able to see anything that looked larger than a couple of feet in diameter, though. (Side note: some of the covers have “kanalizasyon” stamped on them- the turkish word for sewer, obviously derived from the french term “canalisation”) I rarely heard, saw or smelled any significant amount of wastewater flowing through anything.  I’m sure there are good things to be found. I’m just too used to Montreal. I guess my sewersense needs to become more refined for it to work in Europe.

A typical Istanbul manhole cover. Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/smallscreen

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So Teri and I will be leaving for Greece later this week where we’ll be getting married on June 20th. I was never able to convince her that having the ceremony in a drain would be a good idea, but she did agree to doing a  slightly ridiculous photoshoot.  I figure any girl that’s willing to humour me to this extent is one that’s worth holding onto. Besides, she looks quite fetching in polka-dot boots, doesn’t she?

See you soon.

Decarie Raimbault sewer excavation, 1958. (Photo source: City of Montreal Archives)

So  “construction season” started a few days ago here in Montreal, and with it came the City’s announcement that they’ll be spending a record $608 million this year on road and underground infrastructure projects. According to a CBC report, roughly half of that amount will be spent on sewers, but I’m guessing this will mostly involve replacing watermains.  Journalists have this habit of referring to any underground pipe as being a sewer regardless of its function.

Construction crews have been busy ripping up the asphalt of the streets for awhile now, replacing the century-old iron mains with what looks to be  PVC pipe. It’s for this reason that portions of Notre Dame and Maisonneuve are currently closed off to general traffic. I’m sure overhauling some of  the older brick sewers is next on the agenda. Any piece of infrastructure that’s approaching 150 years old is bound to make any civil works engineer nervous. While I insist the old brick sewers are still in reasonably good shape, maybe the people who get paid to inspect them for a living have a better idea as to what’s on the verge of collapsing and what isn’t. Or maybe it’s just a make-work thing. Who knows?

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There’s a terrific multi-page article about Montreal’s lost rivers in the Saturday edition of The Gazette. I’ve been working with journalist Marian Scott who did an excellent job researching the subject by bringing in a broad range of people including city historians, architects, engineers, geologists and environmentalists. It’s been a fun and interesting project and it was nice to see a few of my photos used. I really wasn’t expecting to see myself on the front page so that was a nice surprise.

Unfortunately what’s online isn’t quite as interesting without a lot of the visuals that are in the print version, but for anyone interested in having a read, you’ll find the different sections below.

Our island’s lost rivers – main article

‘Drainer’ explores the world of water under our feet – section about yours truly (a few of the numbers in there aren’t quite right, but otherwise all is good)

Water, water everywhere -  summary of some of the island’s lost watercourses

This CSI tracks a polluted creek – section involving Daniel Green of Le Société Pour Vaincre la Pollution (the Society to Conquer Pollution)

This has nothing to do with the underground, but a series of my photos can be found in the latest issue of Geist magazine. They can also be found here on their website, but like most photographs, they always look a little better in print.  As usual, the rest of the issue is pretty good too so go have a look!