All-night LRT tunnelling taking toll in northwest Centretown
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN December 16, 2013 11:00 PM
OTTAWA — The mining machines chewing through rock under downtown Ottawa to make a new rail tunnel are amazing, powerful devices. But don’t try to sleep above one.
“It’s very hard to describe it. It’s a very low-wave, bass kind of sound,” said Valentin Chirica, who lives on the second floor of the Queen Juliana Apartments at 100 Bronson Ave., close to the “west portal” of the tunnel. He and his wife have had almost no sleep in days, he said, awakened over and over again by a sensation that’s somewhere between a vibration in their bones and a hum in their ears, coming from the “roadheader” nicknamed Chewrocka that’s grinding away at the rock under their home.
“If you sleep in a house close to the airport, if a jet is coming to take off or to land, that’s what it feels like. The difference is, it isn’t for two minutes. It’s all night.”
They’re getting desperate, he said.
“Two weeks ago, it was supportable. We bought several kinds of earplugs and noise-cancellation headsets from Bose and we were able to sleep with those,” he said. But as mining east from LeBreton Flats has progressed, each measure has failed. Two kinds of earplugs plus the headsets are useless, Chirica said Monday. On the weekend they went to a hotel.
“We’re paying $2,300 for the rent and on top of that we have to pay $150 each night to stay in a hotel. We . . . we cannot do this,” said Chirica, a senior adviser with the Canadian Border Services Agency. He and his wife have a lease for a year; the digging isn’t the landlord’s fault, so they can’t break their deal and move out. He’s complained to via email to Mayor Jim Watson, and they’ve complained to Coun. Diane Holmes and to the Rideau Transit Group, which is building the tunnel. “They simply don’t listen and they don’t respond.”
Holmes did take up the case Monday. She’s had about half a dozen complaints from the Queen Juliana, she said. A bylaw officer went to measure the sound on the weekend but didn’t get a usable reading from inside the building, possibly because the sound is too low for sensors that are designed to register the rackets from parties and regular machinery.
“The tunnelling is not very deep, as of yet. They’re just going in, so they’re right under the building,” Holmes said. She said she had hoped that the mining of the tunnel would move faster than it has so the inconvenience to residents right by the digging would at least be over quickly.
The roadheaders are supposed to clear three to four metres of tunnel each day but according to weekly reports posted to the project’s website, the machines working from the west opening have made it 55 metres in six weeks. At a briefing earlier in the fall, the Rideau Transit Group said the sound from the mining would be a low rumble, imperceptible to most people unless they listened hard.
Maybe during the day, Chirica said. “When you dig and drill through the rock, it will entail strong vibration and noise. It’s not clay, which you can drill through quickly and with little noise.”
He’s a strong supporter of the rail project as a key move in “modernizing our capital,” he said, but he said he can’t take any more.
The tunnelling needed for the $2.1-billion rail system is exempt from part of the city noise bylaw, so it can go on 24 hours a day. But it can’t be louder than 65 decibels overnight at a “point of reception,” such as Chirica’s bedroom. That’s loud enough, about the level of a one-on-one conversation, but Chirica has a sound-measuring phone app — it’s not a proper device for enforcing the law, he acknowledges, but it’s what he’s got — that captured sounds over the weekend that maxed out at 85 decibels.
Holmes has had a frustrating time trying to communicate with the Rideau Transit Group about what’s going on, she said. Until she can, she won’t be sure what might be done.
“That is something we will have to deal with,” Holmes said. “And when we can get information from the constructors, we’ll know how long this is going to take, how far are they going a day, when do they expect to be beyond this building’s foundations, and what can be done until they are.”
Chirica said he’s hoping for an adjustment to the rules, or to RTG’s digging practice.
“I hope they will stop, or reorganize their work to do something less noisy at nighttime, between midnight and 6 a.m. Maybe they can do something other than the drilling, I don’t know,” he said. But at the work’s current rate, it’s going to take at least a month, maybe as much as two, before the roadheader gets far enough for residents of the Queen Juliana to sleep soundly again.
The city bureaucracy didn’t immediately respond to questions from the Citizen — about whether the noise is louder than expected or whether there’s anything that is being or could be done for nearby residents. The Rideau Transit Group’s contract specifically forbids the consortium to speak publicly about what it’s doing.
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