Avalanches don’t just happen in high mountains. The snow dumps of the City of Montreal also present such risks, analyzed a labor inspector after an avalanche which damaged five heavy goods vehicles and pushed them over several meters.
The incident occurred at the Angrignon site, in LaSalle, on March 3, according to reports from the Commission for Standards, Equity, Health and Safety at Work (CNESST) obtained through an access to information request.
No one was injured in this event, which should not be minimized: a similar avalanche claimed the life of a trucker, in 2017, in a snow dump in Trois-Rivières.
The City of Montreal subcontractor responsible for managing the site, Béluga Construction, “does not use methods and techniques aimed at identifying, controlling and eliminating risks,” labor inspector Érik Pichette wrote in a report. last spring. “His working method concerning the piling of the snow is incomplete in relation to the way of proceeding and the delimitation of the safety zones. This poses a risk of injury in the event of an avalanche. »
Mr. Pichette notably criticized Béluga Construction for letting the trucks drive very close to a mound of more than 20 meters of snow. The slope of this mound was also too steep, according to the inspector.
Beluga Construction declined to comment on the situation.
The City of Montreal pointed out that the winter of 2022-2023 had been particularly snowy, posing challenges for storing snow in its depots.
“The City of Montreal, together with the CNESST and the external supplier, is ensuring that the problematic elements are specified and corrected in order to ensure implementation for the winter of 2023-2024,” said publicist Gonzalo Nuñez. .
“Several avalanches occur each year”
The phenomenon in snow deposits is still little studied, explained geography professor Daniel Germain, from the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM). He himself was commissioned by a consortium of cities in 2018-2019 to conduct an exploratory study of the phenomenon.
“Several avalanches occur each year on waste snow sites in Quebec, sometimes even causing a fatal accident”, he indicated in this document, made public in 2021. Professor Daniel Germain’s team has elsewhere studied a “major avalanche” that occurred at the Angrignon snow dump in 2019.
“Certain risky practices can be quickly identified (eg: trucks driving for a long time at the foot of piles)”, concluded the exploratory study, which underlines that the behavior of windblown snow is very different from snow in the mountains. “In any case, it will be necessary to continue the analyzes and reflections to study relevant alternatives to these practices. »
By email, the geographer added that the rest of the research project had been on the back burner since the COVID-19 pandemic. “The desire to continue and relaunch the project is still present both among the partners and within my research team at UQAM,” he indicated.