Gargantua
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We arrived in Toronto with the intent to visit Gargantua, a massive 4.8m drain, supposedly the largest in Ontario. We found a few probable manholes, but all of them were frozen shut. Surprisingly, bashing them with a derelict shopping cart didn’t help. After maybe an hour or two of walking around a snowy park at 10pm in our hip waders and headlamps, we decided to give up on gargantua and head south to the Belt Line.
Belt Line
[pullquote-right]“This is architecture as dreamed of by Adolf Loos: shaved of all ornament, exquisitely smooth, functional – while architecture schools were busy teaching Mies van der Rohe, civil engineers were perfecting the Modern movement beneath their feet.”[/pullquote-right]
We entered the drain at the south end of the Memorial Park storage chambers: 4 long narrow chambers designed to fill with water during heavy rains. The heavy sediment on the floor was evidence that this flooding happened quite frequently. A small stream of water had carved out a winding path through the sand– making an almost natural landscape in the otherwise stark chambers.
We proceeded up the north entrance to the chambers, through a short length of RCP, and eventually came to a junction room where the main pipe of the Belt Line passed on the other side of a short wall. Should the main pipe fill with runoff, the overflow would cross the half-wall and flow into the storage chambers… to be dealt with later (by what means we can only guess). A short journey up the trunk line yielded little excitement, so we returned to the storage tanks to play with our cameras.
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At the north end of the chamber, a ladder led up to a small platform that connected two of the tanks. At the level of this platform was a small (maybe 1500mm) RCP that led west. Ryan crawled into it for a couple of photos, and finding it dry and clean, he crawled down it a short distance. We found it unusual that the pipe should begin sloping up, so near to the surface, so a few of us slipped and scrambled up to find out where it went. We found ourselves in a small square room, half above ground, with vents all around the top.
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The last image (above) is the vent chamber from the outside; I grabbed the picture later from Google Street View.
