Oh, Crumbling City (Part 26)

When it isn't an alert to boil water because of a human error, it's Nature giving us the worst storm we've ever faced. When that's not it, it's politicians killing the city's soul by forcing it its centuries-old commerces and/or ''freak places'' to shut down.

But mostly, it's crumbling infrastructures. Tunnels. Or the fucking subway's roof. Or slabs of concrete falling on a woman quietly eating her lunch at a restaurant.

And lots of sinkholes, many of them smack-dab in the middle of downtown: Sherbrooke street (near McGill); at the corner of Ste-Catherine and McGill; St-Mathieu and Ste-Catherine; And today's newest one, at Guy and Ste-Catherine (one block East of St-Mathieu):

Yes, it swallowed a backhoe. It was hungry, give it a break.

Now that we've established that the ground cannot hold any weight, let's move on to another topic which is a whole lot sadder: three blocks East and one block South of there, at nearly the same time, a man was crushed to death by a three-tonne metal plate that fell on him. It was from a crane that hadn't been secured properly on the construction site of yet another condo tower, this one adjacent to the Bell Centre, where they plan on building over 100 storeys of condos (therefore roughly 300-400 dwellings) worth from half a million to $2.5M each, dispersed in two or three towers, I forget).

The thing is... there are two subway lines underneath that floor, and aqueducts. And they'll need to increase the water flow potential to supply these new dwellings, as they are pretty much just parking lots or pedestrian walkways for the moment. On ground that can barely handle regular vehicles right now.

And though theoretically, the sound of complete families of bourgeois millionaires crumbling to their deaths doesn't seem like the worst thing that can happen, any death is still tragic, and hundreds of them at a time, all of which could easily be pinned on a city's over-eagerness to make easy money and weed out the poor from its downtown core, would make us the laughingstock of the civilized world. Plus Dubai.

At times like these, I understand those who deny the existence of climate change: who cares about what'll kill us in 50 years since we'll do ourselves in with greed, corruption, seedy construction, poisonous foods, and wars in less than that anyway?