The city of Montreal is taking new measures to assess the safety of downtown buildings, after a concrete slab fell from the aging Marriott Hotel back in July, killing a 33-year-old woman while she ate dinner with her husband.
City Hall is sending out letters to several building owners, asking for engineers' reports certifying the buildings and their underground facilities, such as parking garages, are safe.
It's the latest move following a series of problems with buildings in the downtown core. Two years ago, cracks were discovered in a tunnel under a major downtown street, De Maisonneuve Blvd. That forced the evacuation of The Bay and other buildings in the downtown core.
The city sent notices to the owners of 63 other buildings that have underground structures, demanding inspection reports. But only a quarter of them replied.
Now, following the death of 33-year-old Lea Guilbeault who was struck by a piece of concrete that fell from a building in July, the city is insisting on the remaining safety reports, and has asked building owners to comply immediately.
Quebec's building watchdog, the Regie du Batiment, is expected to send similar notes to landlords.
Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay insists the underground city is safe but says precautionary inspections are needed at several buildings.
"The information I have is that there's no danger for the public but I'd like to see that in writing," said Tremblay.
Prof. Saeed Mirza, a structural engineer with McGill University, says Montreal's brutal winters can easily degrade a building's underground facilities.
"There is salt and snowmelt coming down into the ground and it causes corrosion in the steel reinforcements and leads to other deterioration in the concrete. The result is the underground infrastructure would be deteriorating if it is not maintained properly," Mirza told Canada AM Wednesday.
He said many of the buildings in Montreal are old and really should be inspected, to prevent another tragedy like the one this summer.
"The Marriott, where the piece of concrete fell on that poor woman at the outdoor restaurant, that building had not been inspected since 2000. We now know there was deterioration going on," he said.
Mirza says the real problem is that engineers are not designing buildings with future maintenance needs in mind. Instead, they are focusing on keeping costs down in the initial build.
"I call it 'design, build and forget.' The maintenance part is just left to somebody else," he says.
Some of the structural components of the Marriot Hotel, for example, cannot even be accessed and therefore, can't be assessed for integrity.
Two months after the accident, inspectors still haven't been able to do a full inspection. The block is still closed to traffic, as the owners have yet to release a safety report.
Mirza says building constructors need to think about structural maintenance needs in the future, just as car manufacturers provide detailed maintenance manuals to new owners. They know that all cars will need to be fixed at some point, to extend their lives; so builders should be thinking the same way.
"I believe there has to be a paradigm shift here where an engineer designs and builds for the entire service life."
That may mean more costs upfront during construction, says Mirza, but buildings would require less maintenance later on and repairs would be simpler.
Tremblay has asked the city's legal department to study New York City's Law 11, which requires mandatory inspections of building facades every five years, and see if something similar can be implemented here.
