Hours-long closure on Mt. Pleasant after midtown hydro tunnel leak
Posted October 10, 2012 5:30 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Emergency repairs prompted an hours-long closure on Mt. Pleasant Road south of St. Clair Avenue Wednesday morning.
The road, which was closed between Roxborough and Inglewood drives, reopened at 6:30 a.m.
Hydro crews were working to lower a special piece of equipment into a tunnel in the area and were pumping out ground water when a leak developed due, apparently, to a broken seal.
The work was part of a $116-million project to dig a 2.5-metre tunnel for cable upgrades.
Both hydro and Toronto Fire crews pumped approximately half a million litres of water into the shaft in order to stabilize the leak and prevent a massive sinkhole from opening up in the road near the Rosehill pumping station.
“Once you’ve got water coming in you don’t want it to bring dirt in with it and then have a partial collapse somewhere else, so you want to stop that as soon as possible, pump water in, stabilize the pressure and then the work crews can take care of it,” Toronto Fire district chief Paul Halls said.
