MONTREAL - There's a leaky world of pipes underneath the city where an estimated 40 percent of what passes through simply gets lost into cracks. Five years ago Montreal pledged $4 billion over 20 years to fix the faulty piping which causes 700 water main breaks a year.
And sometimes those flooding events are splashier than others.
On Sunday morning at around 2 a.m. the city's faulty plumbing doused seven homes on Mackenzie St. in Cote-des-Neiges.
Austin Patel was arriving home when he noticed something wrong.
"I saw the puddle of water and it's just growing bigger and bigger and I thought: ‘what's going on here?'" said Patel
A call to 911 didn't provide an immediate solution, as the only way to stop such a rogue flow is to have the city close the line. It's a process which can take hours.
Another home next door was hit as well, and not for the first time.
"I'm waiting until it dries out a bit to see if it will start again because the water was high enough to go inside the car," said Mackenzie St. resident Irving Griffith.
"Several years ago the water main coming down our house was broken but we caught that in time and fixed that," he said.
