Bitter cold heightens construction woes for Mile End residents

Noon is usually a busy time of day forH Restaurant, butwith no water on Thursday, the Vietnamese-fusion restaurant wasturning customers away.

The source of the problem is work being done on Jeanne-Mance Street betweenMont-Royal and Villeneuvestreets. The water pipes are being replaced, and the entire street has been dug up for months.

With the cold snap, the hoses that stretch from fire hydrants at both ends of the street and run along the sidewalks to supply water to each buildinghave frozen.

"We came in in the morning, and we don't have any water," saidFlore-AnneDucharme, one of H Restaurant's owners.

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Ducharme says she'd normally chalk it up to a one-time freeze due to colder-than-average weather, but the intermittent water supply has been a problem since the infrastructure work began in August.

"They've been cutting water on and off even when the restaurant was open," she said.

Ducharme laughs after a city worker drops by to giveher a notice saying the boil-water advisory in place since the last cut-off, earlier this week, has been lifted.

"That's great, if we had water," she said.

The restaurant has made numerous complaints to the city, to no avail.

'One just accepts it'

Residents are equally unhappy about the problems.

Temporary fenceslinethe sidewalks on both sides of Jeanne-ManceStreet, to prevent people from tumbling into the construction site. Slippery metal grates cover gaping holes in the sidewalks,and thick hoses snake along the sidewalks, running up through front yards to supply water to each household.

Longtime residentWilbur Jonssonhas accepted the troubles as par for the course for Montreal construction projects.

"There's noway they can deal with the problems without turning off the water occasionally. So one just accepts it," he said.

The 82-year-old retired McGill math professor does admit he had to solicit the help of a friend on neighbouringde l'Esplanade Avenue to supplywater the last time the hoses froze, earlier this week. She brought him plastic bottles filled with fresh drinking water and filled a bucket with water, so he could flush the toilet.

First phase of work almost complete

The City of Montreal saidthe weather caused the temporary water-intake pipesto freeze, but residents only had to deal with the issue for a few hours.

It said those temporary pipes will be removed at the end of November, once phase one of the work on the street is completed.

While the city usually gives 48-hour warnings before cutting off a resident's water supply, it says the cuts in this case were short-term, made necessary so workers couldremove the temporary pipes to replace them with new ones.

Work on phase two will begin in the spring.