Work to resume on new CHUM hospital after heat causes day-long shutdown

Construction inside Montreal's French superhospital, known as the CHUM, will resume Saturday after the site was shut down Friday morning due to high heat and humidity.

The province's workplace health and safety board (CNESST) decided to suspend work at the site after tests done at the site on Thursday found temperatures in parts of the building reached nearly 40 C with 90 per cent humidity.

"It's much too humid. Every time you try to move, you try to [turn] a screw, it's very not easy, it's hard to breathe," said Marco Patenaude, a representative for the CSD Construction union.

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Following a Friday afternoon meeting between Construction Santé Montréal, the consortium responsible for the hospital's construction, and the CNESST, work will resume Saturday. As a condition of the return to work, workers will have to have 15-minute breaks every hour.

Starting Monday, the employer will have to make sure that workers at the site undergo training about how to detect signs of heat stroke and that cooling towers are installed.

About 2,600 construction crew members were forced to leave the site Friday morning. Six people were taken to St. Luc Hospital because of the extreme heat.

None of the windows open in the hospital's central building. Last week, crews walked off the job because of the conditions, with some workers reporting they found it hard to breathe.

On Monday, the union approved a return to the site after workers were promised air conditioning inside the building.