Metropolitan Natures: Environmental Histories of Montreal

8. The Political Ecology of Floodsin the Late Nineteenth Century

133 The Political Ecology of Floods in the Late Nineteenth Century Christopher G. Boone 8 “The ice is piled up in an immense heap in the center of the channel, blocking it completely,” remarked a New York Times correspondent reporting from Montreal in the spring of 1885.1 It was not the first or last time that floods in Montreal made international news. Because the Island of Montreal is situated on a north-flowing river in a cold climate, it has suffered frequent ice jams and consequent flooding. Ice jams can form in the late fall to early winter, but those that occur during the spring breakup bring the worst inundations as increases in temperature and energy from the river’s current cause the ice cover to thin and buckle. Ice jams are common at the narrows to Lake St. Pierre (fig. 8.1) and near the Montreal Harbor, and when they are accompanied by spring rains, severe flooding can occur.2 The consequences of the 1885 ice jam were predictable, if alarming: “water backed up suddenly and rushed in a huge wave over the wall in front of the city,” commented the correspondent, “flooding the streets in the business part of the city to a depth of two feet and depositing huge blocks of ice.” Such flood events brought destruction and despair, though rarely death (during one ice jam, an unfortunate family was crushed to death under ice in a shanty near the river). Reporting on the floods typically concentrated on the commercial core, where the potential for property damage was high, but for the human misery story, reporters turned to the low-lying and mostly Irish and British working-class communities west of the central city. 134 - Christopher G. Boone In the largely Irish community of Griffintown, for instance, during a spring flood in 1887, “whole families could be seen at every window, the men being prevented by the flood from going to their work. The families in the lower tenements had been taken by their more fortunate neighbors up stairs, who did everything in their power to help them, but the water had risen so rapidly that they had been able to save only a very small proportion of their belongings.”3 The working-class communities in St. Gabriel and St. Ann’s wards were most vulnerable to floods (see fig. 8.1).4 Occupying the lowest rungs on the social ladder, inhabitants of these wards lived in substandard housing in this industrial district adjacent to the Lachine Canal and St. Lawrence River. Many residents worked in the Grand Trunk Railway shops, one of a growing number of large-scale manufacturers in nineteenth-century Montreal.5 Until the late 1880s, these communities below the hill of ensconced privilege in Anglo Montreal were victims of frequent floods. However, as result of a concerted effort in the late 1880s by the city and the federally appointed and influential members of the Harbour Commission to build permanent flood control and improve Montreal’s harbor works, residents of St. Ann’s and St. Gabriel wards became accidental beneficiaries of political machinations that largely served the needs of industrial capital. Ward politics also played a significant role in Fig. 8.1. Montreal wards and the fifty-foot contour line, 1903. Map drawn by the author. The Political Ecology of Floods - 135 ensuring flood protection for residents of Point St. Charles, Griffintown, and the annexed village of St. Gabriel. However, the initiative to establish permanent flood control was by no means certain and nearly failed. This chapter examines the story of flooding and flood control in latenineteenth -century Montreal as an exploration into the dynamics of the city as a socio-ecological system.6 Increasingly in the social and physical sciences, as well as environmental history, cities are no longer treated as wholly human artifacts but as the product of interacting social and natural processes. In the fields of urban ecology and urban political ecology, the terms “socio-ecological system ” and “socio-nature” are used to describe the coupled human-environment relationships that exist in cities. The terms imply an interaction between people and nature that is reflexive, distinct from old conceptions of unidirectional human impact on the environment. Human decisions that modify the environment , for instance, can have feedbacks that in turn affect quality of life, which may require new decisions on environmental management. To understand the story of flood...