A 34-year-old Morroccan had a lot to drink and couldn't swim and drowned at Oka Beach. A couple of guys tried to save him and one managed to grab his ankle but lost his grip. His body was only found the next day. The beach is about six kilometres long and only one has a lifeguard. The eastern side is full of nudes and I have visited but never taken photo (a journalist friend who once tried was confronted by an angry mob, so I won't bother. At a certain spot there's a dangerous dropoff where you take an extra step and the ground is suddenly 40 feet deep. Two died in the same spot in 97 and another in 2007, authorities love to blame the victim but they should really dump a few big rocks down in that hole, it's not exactly like high-tech repairs would be required. (The worst-ever drowning fiasco in Lake of Two Mountains occurred in 1954 when 12 young black children were drowned in a boat owned by a guy named Jack Seligman).
Articles I liked: Here's an amazing description of the 1972 wildcat harbour strike by the late Kendal Windeyer. Back then the ancient gang system was in place, as opposed to the container system - which see big old cans of goods hauled off by crane and then popped onto rail or trucks - which is in use now. So lunkhead workers would literally carry stuff off like movers and they'd manipulate their schedules so they could take a couple of weeks off and still pretend they were at work earning their hefty $12,000 a year for the 47 weeks that the port would remain open. You'd have to imagine management would be pretty exasperated with the workers, who didn't help their cause by refusing to discuss their point of view with media. It also established a sort of precedent for the Olympic Stadium, the construction of which was a disaster largely due to workers goofing off.
Speaking of 1976, a massive job was undertaken that year to link up the Lasalle water plant with the aqueduct which sits under that field across the street from the Royal Victoria hospital. A welder lit up his torch and an explosion ensued, killing a 17-year-old Clarence Guimond on his first day of the job. The article doesn't answer whether he caused the blast. Jean Guy Tremblay, 35, also died. Others who were injured hung around to pose for photos and do interviews, one of them even grinning that he wasn't killed. Now, who knew that the facility included a tunnel 200 feet below the mountain?
Legendary Montreal scenester Mike Lynes, now known as Mick Lynes, made a recent return to his hometown with axe, of the acoustic variety, in hand. The pride of Park Ex was also a neighbour on the legendary Kinkora Avenue that was demolished by greedy developers in the late 80s. Mick did a couple of well-attended shows and has put up some of his songs here for those who want to know what he's been up to.
Back in the fifties, Miron et Freres, a major Montreal Contractor, used to haul sand dredged from the Oka area on barges handled by a fleet of their own Diesel tugs to an unloading point on the south shore of the Lachine Canal opposite Dominion Bridge in Lachine.
ReplyDeleteThe tugs and barges were painted Miron orange with red trim.
The sand was unloaded onto great piles by a crane, and then moved by Miron's Mack dump trucks to where it was required.
As children we would climb the sand piles and look over onto canallers moving thru the adjacent canal.
The barges and tugs would be moored to the canal wall when not being used.
I understand someone complained about the amount of sand being removed, and this was stopped prior to 1959.
A bit of history from Montreal's and Lachine's past.
Thank You.
In more recent years when there were plans to put something up on the Mt Royal metro Station site, local consensus was in favour of leaving it open as a public space.
ReplyDeleteMakes sense, but the concrete sorta leaves it neither fish nor fowl. They should plant some more trees and dig up the concrete if they're going that route.
ReplyDeleteInefficiency and questionable practices at our harbour (and others around the world) have a long history. Dangerous working conditions, corruption, smuggling, and other criminal activity has been part of the fabric of life where ship meets shore: an environment where the inevitable mentality of opportunism can and does quickly develop.
ReplyDeleteIt is only after 911 when the very real threat of national security worldwide emerged that ports around the world began to put more stringent measures into effect--and rightly so.
Personally, I always thought it ridiculous--if not downright reckless--to find that open gate leading directly from Riverside Street (off of Mill Street) onto the pier at Windmill Point. I can only assume it was locked at night, but during the daytime absolutely anyone could walk or bike through from the nearby bikepath right up alongside any ships docked there!
One can only speculate how easy it would have been for a crew-member to toss contraband to a waiting accomplice. Not once did I ever see the Harbour Police cruising the area, nor was I ever challenged by anyone as I curiously cycled my way in and out--the strong malt smell of the nearby Canada Maltage Company ever pervasive.
Having held a white-collar position myself with the Port of Montreal some years ago, I actually saw first-hand the type of people we had to deal with. Many of them likely never finished grade school.
While certainly everyone has a right to better themselves and to expect good working conditions, it was generally the old story: give them an inch and they'd try to take a mile. Overpaid and underworked was the rule--and probably still is.
Worker opposition to automation is, of course, nothing new either. Wildcat strikers and luddites fearful of losing their jobs went on machine-smashing rampages in the factories of various industries. Firemen went amuck destroying newly-invented steam-pressure fire pumps in the vain hope of keeping their obviously out-of-date and inefficient hand-pumping contraptions.
How many remember awhile back when Montreal Gazette employees went on a very long and acrimonious strike in an attempt to prevent their vintage linotype-printing equipment from being replaced with computers? I wonder what those very same strikers are thinking today?
Hindsight is truly a wonderful thing.
Are you taking a discrete and tangential pot-shot at the "Sauvons Parc Oxygène Save" NIMBYs?
ReplyDeleteOh man, I'm all for them saving Oxygen Park, in fact I even got Norman Nowrocki on CTV Montreal and tried giving him arguments for his cause (which he didn't use). I'm all for them saving that green space. The obvious criticism of it is that they're already about one block away from massive acres of green space, but I think that it should be kept as it nonetheless cuz we need stuff near our houses, not across busy roadways.
ReplyDeleteShip owners are amongst the wealthiest people around, and one doesn’t get wealthy by splurging on salaries.
ReplyDeleteThis is why ships are crewed by third-worlders who are paid peanuts.
So it’s not surprising that stevedores have managed to institute system so they could be paid decent wages; the whining from ship owners is just that they cannot skimp on stevedores like they do on sailors.
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There are several other very deep tunnels used to link various aqueduc reservoirs; one goes from the Desbaillets plant in Lasalle to the Châteaufort réservoir (at Van-Horne at Darlington); when it was dug, there was an access point in the Benny Park in NDG.
I think people like having the space at Mont-Royal metro for the summer market and the Christmas tree guys and the sugar shack, they've all become part of the local scene. The Plateau needs that kind of loose marketplace kind of space and the metro has provided it. Besides, it wasn't always so open - there used to be a caisse pop on the eastern edge there:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/guil3433/4075281239/
Dear EMDX.,
ReplyDeleteThank You for connecting up a memory from my youth.
For quite some time in the fifties there was a tunnel similar to a mine opening at the corner of Cavendish and Monkland on the northeast corner which sloped down underground.
Trucks were entering and exiting almost constantly dragging mud out onto Monkland and south on Cavendish.
I then assumed it had something to do with the sewer system, as, in later years, after Cavendish was pushed north of the CPR tracks from Cote St Luc in 1965? another large sewer was dug in above the CPR.
Few that I talk to now a days remember the adit off Monkland above Benny Farm.
When constructed, there was a mini traffic circle on Cavendish between the two segments of Benny Farm between Monkland and Sherbrooke which actually impeded traffic flow.
This was removed in 1962?
Benny Farm, when built, was heated by steam from a coal-fired steam plant in the centre of the easternmost part of the complex east from Cavendish.
Thank You.
For a more comprehensive study and history of Montreal's underground tunnels and sewers, it is well worth checking out this site:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.undermontreal.com/
As a point of interest, when the site of the Cartier Monument (where the "Tam Tam" is held on Fletcher's Field) was being considered, one proposal was to place it right in the centre of Park Avenue with the road going around it in a circle a la the Arc de Triomphe in Paris!