Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel | The government “may have waited too long”

The closure of three out of six lanes of the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel until 2025 is symptomatic of the “delay” that Quebec has taken in inspecting its road infrastructure, say experts, consultants and elected officials who call the government to “provide all the information” to the public on this vast project.

Henri Ouellette-Vezina
The Press

“We may have waited too long for tunnel maintenance, a bit like we did with the Mercier bridge or the Île-aux-Tourtes bridge. If there had been the necessary periodic maintenance, it would have been possible for the engineers to detect certain problems,” says transportation planning expert Pierre Barrieau, who teaches at the University of Montreal.

In his eyes, the engineers of the Quebec Ministry of Transport (MTQ) are “too small in number” to “both manage the sites and take care of maintenance surveys”. “It would take us at least 50 to 75 additional engineers and inspectors to do more frequent inspections,” he says. We are way behind other provinces or certain American states. »

“In the industry, we have long wondered what they were waiting for to act. We’ve been hearing rumors of cracks, of water seeping in, of a deficient structure for a long time, but it’s always been managed, never really communicated,” says Yves D. Gagnon, consultant in strategic movement of goods and president. of Propulsion Plus.

In the eyes of the consultant, who has worked in the transport industry for more than 40 years, the bridge-tunnel “is an infrastructure that hides a lot of things”. “Very few people know the real situation of the tunnel infrastructure in Montreal,” he sighs.

The nose “stuck on the leaf”

At the Professional Association of Government Engineers of Quebec (APIGQ), secretary-treasurer Andy Guyaz believes that there was probably a “lack of inspection in monitoring the behavior of the structure”. “Is it due to an inadequate amount of resources? We ask ourselves questions. The Ministry has its nose glued to the sheet, it’s always the same problem, ”he criticizes.

“We wonder why the government doesn’t set up dedicated, public teams of engineers for this kind of major infrastructure. It’s okay to go private, but for the tunnel, the Pierre-Laporte bridge, the Turcot interchange, it takes regular inspection. We could target them, and be much more diligent, ”explains Mr. Guyaz.

The MTQ says that nothing could have prevented the need to carry out this major work. “It’s a structure that dates back to the 1960s. Degradation takes place according to life cycles, and at some point, in a life cycle, we are obliged to carry out a major intervention. We have no choice,” explains the director of major road projects in Montreal, Martin Giroux.

According to the MTQ framework, the government’s structural inspection program is “very solid”. With the large number of structures in Quebec, “we are never safe from discovering things as is currently the case, and there are things that are in the concrete that we cannot see, which are difficult to access, but there are regular inspections,” he says.

Mr. Giroux recognizes all the same that it is possible to “push a little further”, technologies evolving rapidly. “There are devices that can measure degradation with different techniques, and better see the different levels of damage. That said, the Department is nevertheless quite at the forefront of this. We follow the parade,” he said.

A badly damaged vault

According to our information, a “damage statement” concerning the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel had been sent to the MTQ in 2019. A more recent notice, sent this year, would however have convinced the authorities to require urgent work, due to “badly damaged” surfaces. The authorities have also been aware of problems affecting the walls of the tunnel since February.

However, it was only more recently that we learned that the vault showed 60% more damage than expected.

Former Minister of Transport and Liberal MP André Fortin demands that the Legault government make public “all inspection reports and reports on the useful life of the tunnel, so that everyone can have the information for a decision. enlightened on the use of our public money”.

“We are asking for the most complete transparency,” said the elected official, who denies not having done enough during his term as minister. “We knew what was at stake, we knew that there was work to be done, but certainly not of the extent claimed today. »

According to Mr. Fortin, Quebec will also have to “go further in mitigation measures”.

Jean-Philippe Meloche, professor at the School of Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Montreal, agrees. “This kind of experience forces people to rethink their mobility. However, the tunnel is not in a well-served public transport axis. There is the metro that goes to Longueuil, but there aren’t many other options. The absorptive capacity – with public transport and telecommuting – is there, but it is limited,” he says.