Friday, September 27, 2013

Montreal and earthquakes again

I'm just back from another trip to Montreal.  As you recall, I used to cringe going under all those bridges that looked like they would fall down any minute.  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.   Now they are fixing them all up, and the construction is terrible!

It's interesting trying to get around with gps.  The car one has no hope trying to keep up with the construction, but it does dead reckoning in the massive tunnel system.  So, I looked up my route on Google first, and then tried to follow it with the car gps.

Going around, I found my worse ever construction for an earthquake zone.  As we know, the insurance guys have estimated the 1 in 500 earthquake to be an M7.1 somewhere in Quebec.  I like to think of it as under Hamilton, but it could anywhere along the Ottawa River and St. Lawrence structures.  Now, Montreal is mostly on that volcanic rock which makes up the mountain, but I was zooming along the river.  Yep, that will be total destruction.  But near there they have soft-storey brick Monteal walk-ups.  That is the worst!  Good-bye to them.  I think the standard brownstones up the hill will be okay, but there is going to be a mess near the Olympic stadium.  Lest anyone think I'm picking on Montreal, we got our landslides up in Ottawa, and our lifelines around Toronto.


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