Quebec town sues province over failure to maintain dam, forcing evacuations

A small town in the Upper Laurentians is suing the Quebec government for $12 million, claiming it failed to properly maintain a local dam, forcing a last-minute evacuation.

On Dec. 4 2023, residents of Chute-Saint-Philippe near Mont Laurier were forced out of their homes due to fears that the local dam was about to collapse. Many were displaced from their homes for up to three weeks while engineers conducted a thorough inspection of the infrastructure and carried out emergency repairs. The town has filed a lawsuit against the government, seeking to cover costs related to the evacuations, including housing the evacuees and compensating local businesses for major financial losses.

“We lived through very anxious times,” said Mayor Normand St-Amour. “We have an older population, many retirees, who had a set routine just before Christmas.”

He said the town is not connected to cellular phone networks, so in case of emergency, officials only have an hour to notify everyone downstream from the dam, yet those affected could be up to two hours away.

“It makes no sense to live like this. You always have it at the back of your mind. Some of these people have limited mobility,” said St-Amour.

The case that could resonate across Quebec, because many cities depend on ageing infrastructure, such as dams and bridges, that could fail, putting the local population at risk.

Frederic Berard, the lawyer representing Chute Saint-Philippe, says this should be a wake-up call for the provincial government.

“The opinion of many people, including some engineers from the Quebec government itself, are saying that those infrastructures are not safe, they are not providing sufficient resources in order to keep them secure. It’s clearly a Quebec problem way bigger than Chute-Saint-Philippe,” he said.