Downtown Montreal Disaster
A 5-block stretch of downtown Montreal is closed to the public after a large crack was discovered in the ceiling of an underground tunnel near the Bay department store.
Part of the underground city, including the green metro line from Lionel Groulx to Berri-UQAM is still closed.
Starting Sunday morning, vehicles are banned, and pedestrian access is restricted, from Union to City Councillors, and from President Kennedy to Ste. Catherine. De Maisonneuve remains closed from Bleury to University.

City engineers say the source of the problem dates back to the 1960s. The Bay department store, which was then called Morgan's, was extended under de Maisonneuve so it could link up with a metro station. The concrete slab over that passage dropped less than one inch on Friday, and engineers say there are cracks on both sides of that slab, between Union and Aylmer. The damage does not extend to the metro tunnel, but it's not safe to re-open yet.
"We will not reopen the metro until we secure the concrete slab," said Mayor Gerald Tremblay. "Once we secure the concrete slab we will open the metro."
Constructions crews are already at work stabilizing and strengthening the faulty slab, but it will take several days to place 1000 support posts under the slab. However the city has yet to figure out why the slab dropped. Civil engineers suspect several causes, including construction on a bike path.
"We know this particular area, well at least I know this area is susceptible to water infiltration," said engineer Helen Christodoulou. "This was like a weak area for years now. It's led to a deflection. They have to take out old plans and assess what was implemented."

The city of Montreal says it's keeping traffic away from a large perimeter for now, but that area could be reduced by Monday.

Video: http://montreal.ctv.ca/cfcf/vid...

There is a diagram done by the engineers and they showed it off to media so if you want to see it, watch the video. It gives you a much better idea of what happened, and if you don't like to read;)

So today was the first time I took the Metro since this happened on Friday, and well I get on at Angrinion which is the first stop on the Green line (to the West) and I had an unusual 10 minute wait before my Metro finally left the station (because they only had 2 Metro's going between Lionel Groulx and Angrinion). So once the other one pulled into Angrinion to turn around, my Metro left and then a message comes on the speakers in the Metro to tell everyone that Lionel Groulx is the last stop. So I get to Lionel Groulx and the Metro pulls in and the first thing you realize is that the station is almost completely empty, there is police tape every where to stop people from waiting on the platform that my Metro pulled into, even though it was a stupid idea because it also stopped everyone from my Metro from getting to the other line, so in the end everyone just ignored the police tape and went under it. And there was 3 cops making sure that everyone was out of the Metro before it went on down the tunel to turn around.

It should be interesting tomorrow morning though...