Water main breaks in the winter months are causing increasing concerns amongst residents

At this week’s Riverview Town Council meeting, Mayor Andrew Leblanc said they’ve received some questions from residents about what is being done to prevent future breaks, especially in Ward 2, down around the Downey and Dobson area.

“Unfortunately, because of the way the water valves are located in that neighbourhood, when we get a break on either Downey Avenue or Dobson Road or even Beaumont, we need to isolate a larger area. So even though the breaks didn’t all occur on Downey, unfortunately, the residents in that neighbourhood were out of water for a period of time during the repairs,” Director of Engineering and Works Michel Ouellet explained.

He stated that those streets have six-inch cast-iron water mains, which the town has been actively replacing since 2006.

“Breaks always tend to occur this time of year. It’s always been at the beginning of the hard, cold winter. We suspect it’s the difference in temperature. The water temperature changes. It gets much colder. The supply of water is from a lake. So the water in the lake definitely gets colder,” Ouellet explained.

He also stressed that they are dealing with pipes that are very brittle and old, and construction practices between 50 and 70 years ago, when they were manufactured and installed, were very poor.

“Textbooks have said that these pipes have a life of 40 years. So if you do the math, the life of these pipes has well expired in the late 1990s, so we’re definitely dealing with a legacy that is haunting us a lot,” Ouellet explained.

The town is installing around two kilometres of PVC per year, which has lowered the number of breaks per year from an average of around 40 to around 16 breaks in 2025.

“It is making a big impact. It’s making a big improvement. We still have a number of streets that we need to address, repair or replace, and those two streets are on our top priority list,” Ouellet added.