Winnipeg: the crumbling city

At least Christine Keilback had a sense of humour about it.

The 58-year-old fell into a buried, uncapped catchbasin on Lipton Street and ended up having to be pulled from the shoulder-deep hole by firefighters. A city investigation later found another uncapped hole across the street — repairs will be undertaken “as soon as possible,” a city spokesperson said.

“It was kind of funny. I was waving to people. I mean, what a stupid situation to find yourself in,” she told the Free Press.

But one thing about the story is that, while it was novel, it wasn’t all that surprising. In fact, Keilback’s hole experience brought a call from a resident on Valour Road about a hole on her boulevard — a hole she’d notified the city about in October, and that still hasn’t been dealt with.

Truth is, everybody in Winnipeg probably has a story about long-incomplete municipal repair projects on their commute or in their neighbourhood.

Whether it’s the barricades for pothole repair left on southbound McPhillips at Redwood since the beginning of April — left there so long now that the spring street cleaning crews have buried the bases of the signs in a deep fold of gravel dust and trash — or the near-constant spring treasures of broken curbs and catch basins tossed up on the boulevard by the snow plows that broke them off in the first place, there are signs galore that the city doesn’t so much catalogue and rank repairs as it fixes them almost haphazardly.

(The pothole on McPhillips, by the way, is so persistent that, if you know where to look, you can see it from space on Google Maps’ satellite view from last summer. Versions of it have been potholing along for the last three years in the same spot.)

A water valve on Lipton Street failed sometime in midwinter, making an icy intersection puddle for a period of weeks — partial repairs followed, but since then, it’s just been a messy hole with broken pavement, alongside pipes and chunks of wood randomly poking out of the ground. Sometimes, there’s warning signage. Often, there’s not.

Broken garbage cart replacements, earlier this year, were facing a five-week delay because the city hadn’t planned for the fact that a large number of the carts were reaching the end of their lifespan. And if your cart is tagged and broken and the garbage crews won’t pick up, what exactly are you supposed to do with your trash for five weeks?

And let’s not even mention painting road lines — in the great line lottery, will McPhillips north of Selkirk get lines this year, or will it be another year without?

Urgent situations do get dealt with, and there are plenty of those, whether it’s sewer line failures or small sinkholes. The city’s 311 line can be a dream to deal with, and action does take place after complaints.

But so many things in the city seem reactive, rather than proactive. And while urgent situations get partially addressed, so often, the last few steps — from repaving to pothole filling to finally, removing barricades — seem to fall off the radar.

The prevailing feeling it leaves behind is of a city that’s lurching from delayed necessary repair to delayed necessary repair, depending on its citizenry to report real dangers and serious issues. And while, yes, this is a city with aging and overwhelmed infrastructure, where problems and their repairs can compound and confound, there are other cities that don’t seem to fly by the seat of their pants in quite the same way.

The city’s first hint of problems shouldn’t come when someone falls into a hole.

Christine Keilback had a sense of humour about it all, and that’s fantastic. But it’s not a funny situation.