Here’s a bit of video footage from about a month ago near the LaSalle entrance to the aqueduct. I’ve been poking around this general area for about a year now, hoping to find something interesting related to either the former or existing water supply intake pipes. I haven’t had much luck with that yet, but while walking through the woods at the edge of the aqueduct, I stumbled across a manhole cover which led to a fairly large, but half-flooded chamber.
After climbing down a very rusty ladder to a narrow ledge, I lit the chamber up with a spotlight to get a better look. A second ladder, with even rustier rungs, was almost entirely submerged from the flooding. I couldn’t see the bottom. I saw an entry point for water along the side of the chamber facing the aqueduct. On the opposite side of the chamber, two additional channels with ceilings sloping down towards the height of the water could be seen. It was difficult to tell if they were entirely submerged, though. I thought that maybe if the water level there was low enough it might be able to get a better look down through the length of them.
Inside the City of Montreal's former water intake conduit
In my last entry I talked about Montreal’s Aqueduct canal and its role in bringing water to the city of Montreal. In this entry, we’ll begin to go underground, but first, a bit more history…
I mentioned the use of hydraulic machinery and how it was powered by water by the aqueduct. Only a small portion of that water (less than 5%) was actually sent through the pipes and into homes and businesses. By the late 1800s, several problems with this system started to make it less than ideal. The first issue was that demand for water was increasing and more horsepower was required to distribute it. The aqueduct at the turn of the century, roughly a quarter the width it is today, was incapable of providing the hydraulic horsepower necessary to power the pumps.
On top of this, the success of system was often at the whims of mother nature. Low water levels in the summer and ice blockages in the winter frequently reduced pumping capacity. As a result, steam power, which was both cost and labour intensive, would then have to be used as a back-up.
Montreal's aqueduct canal at the Crawford Street bridge in Verdun.
So far, most of my entries have dealt with Montreal’s sewers as its the one aspect of the underground that I’ve spent the most time exploring. During my time looking into that particular system it’s been hard to avoid the city’s waterworks, both during my time traveling around (and under) and at the City Archives. While the two systems serve entirely different purposes, they still share a few things in common and often intersect in a number of different ways.
While one can’t exactly travel through the waterworks system to the same extent that you can the sewers, there are still a number of different components that can be peered into and occasionally entered.
Subscribe: