A small town south of the city of Quebec is closely watching its fire hydrants after 41,000 liters of water were stolen in the middle of the night.
Laurent Marcotte, mayor of the municipality of Saint-Léonard-D’aston, who.
He says he doesn’t understand why this happened.
“I would really like to know what is behind this,” said MarcoTte. “The goal is not really to send someone to jail, it is to understand why they need water and why they are not calling the municipalities … they call us, and we organize it together.”
He says he advised the provincial police, who says they will monitor the area to avoid similar incidents in the next few days.
But Marcotte says that this robbery is part of a pattern. For weeks, he says that the city has been on alert due to similar reports from neighboring municipalities, including Saint-Wencles and Sainte-Eulalie, which.
On Thursday morning, he says there was an alert about excessive water consumption in the early hours of Tuesdays and Thursdays.
“There was no fire,” said Marcotte, who sent a municipal alert, urging residents to report suspicious activities.
He says that the city only wants to know why this happened and avoid recurrence, taking into account that when a fire hydrant does not open correctly, or until the end, it can damage the ground and, finally, lead to the need for repair.
“At some point, if the fire hydrant fails and we do not notice it immediately, but an event like a fire happens, we could reach the hydrant and it would not work,” he said.
Marcotte adds that while the city has security cameras that captured some images, they could not decipher plates.
Louis-Philippe Ruel, a provincial police spokesman, says they do not have the details to advance with the archive, but confirmed that private citizens cannot use fire hydrants.
For now, he says that it is a preventive work.
He says that the incident in Saint-Léonard-D’aston was the only one reported and that the police do not know other similar incidents.
