Grand Avenue South wet and wild as geyser soaks heritage cottage and dental office
Spectacular water spout erupts, cars hit by debris as excavation goes awry
CAMBRIDGE — A geyser of water gushed 24 metres in the air. Rocks and debris rained down on a nearby dental office and a historic Scottish cottage.
Tuesday was wet and wild on Grand Avenue South.
Car windows were smashed. Fillings and drillings were postponed. Basements became wading pools.
“It was insane, wasn’t it?” Jen Lima said on Wednesday morning. The dental assistant was scrambling to reschedule appointments at Riverside Dental, a husband-and-wife-run office at Fraser Street and Grand Avenue.
Lima was out at lunch when the rupture occurred at about 3:30 p.m., a few feet in front of the dental office and McDougall Cottage.
A contractor installing a sanitary sewer struck a water main — a 450 millimetre trunk line, the city said — while excavating. For an hour, maybe more, a spectacular spout launched into the cold April afternoon.
No one was hurt, police said. But stones were flung through the air, denting hoods and shattering windows of vehicles belonging to a pair of dental patients, Lima said.
The water formed a canal straight to a pair of staff vehicles owned by the married pair of dentists, Brian Stewart and Carolyn Blair. The back lot, bermed to protect the old stone buildings from a rising Grand River behind them, kept the rising waters corralled.
“Water came up into the car,” said Lima. “They were like submerged.”
Water came through the roof of one dental surgery suite and also soaked the lunch room. Work on one patient had to stop. Another girl had just sat in the dental chair to have a cleaning done. It never got started.
To one side of the dental office, the empty and closed 1858 Scottish cottage was getting a sudden soaking of its own.
“Their backyard sort of looked like ours,” Lima said. “It was just submerged in water, three feet high.”
And inside McDougall Cottage, a half-dozen irreplaceable paintings,
some on loan from family members associated with the heritage home, were in danger of being damaged or destroyed.
A Wee Quilts exhibit in the back, with submissions from all over the world including one from Scotland, was in a wee bit of trouble.
Then, a hero emerged. “Apparently, a cleaning lady saw the issue around the house,” said Adèle Hempel, manager of Region of Waterloo Museums, which runs McDougall Cottage. “She called the historic sites supervisor. The supervisor called the museum. It was a domino effect after that.”
James Jensen, the supervisor of collections and exhibits, grabbed a van and some helpers, Hempel explained. With flashlight in hand, they ventured into the darkened, powerless cottage at dusk. The basement was flooded to the top step and water was gathering in the kitchen. But quilts and artifacts got rescued, she said, as the fire department moved swiftly to funnel away the flood waters. “Everything is safe,” Hempel said on Wednesday.
The dental office, and a 30-unit apartment complex beside it, had no water service for about 12 hours. City staff brought bottled water for them to use.
By 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, nearby streets around Tuesday’s splash zone were reopened. Insurance claims must be made through the contractor, the city said. But the city will help co-ordinate that process.
On Wednesday, the water main was fixed and a restoration firm drained the cottage basement as Lima worked the phones at the closed dental office.
And McDougall Cottage, expected to reopen “soon,” will have one more story to tell — about the Great Grand Avenue Geyser of 2018. “Maybe we can put an exhibit up,” Hempel said.