LRT tunnel expected to shut down in June to repair water leaks
Blair Crawford, Ottawa Citizen
Published Apr 13, 2023 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 3 minute read
Commuters will find out in a few weeks how long the downtown LRT tunnel will be shut down this summer to address troublesome water leaks near uOttawa Station.
While the seepage isn’t a hazard, if unaddressed it does pose a risk to the tunnel.
“This is not a safety issue,” Nicolas Truchon, CEO of Rideau Transit Group, told the city’s Transit Commission on Thursday. “Our objective is to preserve the asset…. If it’s not looked after we’re looking at system disruptions down the road.”
Work crews have been injecting grout to try to fix the leaks, but it hasn’t been working. In winter, the water can cause significant ice build-up.
LRT service through the tunnel will be stopped on the weekends of April 29-30 and May 6-7 so that engineers can inspect the tunnel, figure out what’s happening and formulate a solution to solve it. The LRT will run between Parliament and Tunney’s Pasture in the west and Hurdman and Blair in the east, with replacement buses in service to bridge the gap. Full service is to resume at 5 a.m. Monday.
The tunnel will have to be shut down again to make the repairs. That will likely take place in early to mid-June, before the start of the city’s festival season.
Engineers believe the water is coming through a breach in the tunnel’s water proofing, but can’t say where the breach is because, just like a leak in a roof, the water can travel for some distance from the breach before it finds its way inside the tunnel wall.
The seepage is unrelated to the flooding that occurred in Rideau Station in January from a burst water pipe or the persistent sewage odour at Parliament Station.
In her memo to council, Transit general manager Renée Amilcar said such maintenance is normal for tunnels, but not everyone was buying it.
“I don’t think this is regular maintenance. It appears, in my mind, to be a defect with the workmanship that has gone into this,” Coun. Riley Brockington said.
“It’s normal to have some leaks,” Amilcar told reporters after the meeting. “Is our tunnel worse than somewhere else? I can’t answer that. We’ll know better after the experts’ work is done.
“We know that we have had this problem since the beginning, unfortunately…. This time we hope we have the right fix.”
Transit Briefs
Ridership improves, but…
Bus and train ridership jumped by more than 65 per cent in the first two months of 2023 compared to the year before, but remains frustratingly short of OC Transpo’s budget predictions and is still far below pre-pandemic levels.
There were 5.3 million rides on the bus system and Confederation Line LRT in each of January and February 2023, compared to 3.0 million in January and 3.4 million in February 2022. OC Transpo had projected 5.8 million and 5.5 million rides in January and February in its 2023 budget.
That ridership translated into $22.7 million in fare revenue in the first two months of the year, which is $3.4 million short of the $25.1 million in revenue forecast in the budget.
In the pre-pandemic months of January and February 2019, ridership was 8.9 million and 8.4 million respectively.
The hazards of the job
More than 100 OC Transpo operators were injured in assaults in 2022, the third-highest cause of employee injuries.
The most common cause of the 740 employee injuries last year were caused by being “struck or caught”, according to a report given to Transit Commission on Thursday. Next most common were injuries due to “over exertion.”
“The number of assaults is disturbing,” OC Transpo’s chief safety officer, Paul Treboutat, told the commission.
Plexiglass barriers installed at the beginning of the pandemic have reduced assaults, while security cameras on the buses have been “absolutely vital” to help identify and prosecute those who’ve committed assaults, he said.
“But that doesn’t even begin to make it acceptable, the number of assaults that are occurring,” Treboutat said. “We have to absolutely act on strategy that will ensure that our operators are feeling protected in the workplace.”
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-new...-shut-down-in-june-to-repair-water-leaks
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