Residents of the Yonge and Eglinton neighbourhood are say they’re frustrated with construction workers making noise outside their homes overnight.
Stavros Rougas told CP24 that a team of contractors drove up to the front of an apartment building on 95 Redpath Avenue, just south of Eglinton Avenue East, at around 12:30 a.m. and started dragging heavy equipment down the road.
“There was dirt and they’re coming in with some big construction pillars (and) other things they had to move. Basically, they were bashing and making lots of noise,” he said.
Stavros said that when he went outside to find out why they were working in the middle of the night, they told him to call 3-1-1. He said the crew left about a half hour later – shortly after he started recording a video of the noise on his phone.
“I took this video and put it up on Twitter, passed it along and these clowns decided to show up again at 5:45 to finish up the job,” Stavros said.
“This is no kind of emergency.”
The company, GIO Contracting Inc., told CP24 that they held a permit to perform water main work on Eglinton Avenue Thursday but had stored gravel and other equipment on Redpath Avenue because it could not be stored on Eglinton. Workers confirmed that they did in fact move equipment overnight.
It's unclear whether said permit would allow the company to remove the equipment from Redpath Avenue at the time that they did.
Typically, construction work in the city is not permitted outside the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturdays and none at all on Sundays.
Coun. Josh Matlow said the decision to remove the equipment at night was made to avoid shutting water off at an adjacent building during the day.
“I understand, rationally, that there is a new building going up – whether we like it or not – and there does need to be a water connection. That’s why the residents at the adjacent building requested that the work be done, in a non-disruptive way of course, overnight, so that if they had to lose water it wouldn’t happen during breakfast or dinner time,” he told CP24.
“That being said though, Toronto Water told me that they made it very clear to the contractor that this be non-disruptive work.”
Despite this, Matlow acknowledged that the contractors failed to complete the task without disrupting the neighbourhood.
“Contractors need to understand that they are working in neighbourhoods, that they’re working near people’s homes. If they’re doing work that’s waking people up at two in the morning, they should think how they would feel if someone was doing that outside their family home – they wouldn’t appreciate it,” he said.
“Unfortunately, there’s a dearth of enforcement in this city and also contractors skirt the rules every week throughout the year. There needs to be more accountability and frankly, more enforcement in this city too.”
Toronto Mayor John Tory told reporters at an unrelated event Friday that he would look into what happened.
“When it comes to private construction, there are very clear rules about that that relate to the level of noise and other kinds of things. I’ll look into it because people should not be unduly disrupted,” he said.
