Nahm’sayin?: Concordia, What’s Up With Your Icy Sidewalks?

Montreal and Concordia Need to Realize That There Will Be Ice Every Year

OpinionsTristan D’Amours — Published February 5, 2018

At the very second we let our guard down, Elisa’s feet slip on the ice and rose up to waist-level. All I could do was grab her hand to try and keep her in a somewhat vertical position.

Needless to say I failed.

Seconds later, Elisa was lying on the ground, with her right arm sticking up because I was still holding it. Thankfully she didn’t break anything, but she could’ve been injured in multiple places.

But the bottom line in all of this is: Concordia, what the fuck is up with the streets around your campus?

My mom, a nurse who used to work at a physical rehabilitation centre, still tells me every year the insane amount of people who are breaking knees and hips from slipping on icy roads. People are rushed to the hospital, and a lot of them—my mom included—end up needing a knee or hip prosthesis.

Now, I don’t know if you know about knee prosthesis procedures but I’ll keep the details to a minimum. Okay, let’s just say it involves a saw, a drill, and some cement.

Gore-y foolishness aside, if you’re still at a young age and forced to get one of those because of icy roads, it could really suck. Prostheses only function optimally for a finite amount of time. You can only replace it once and then you’re stuck with the one you have. The younger you are, the higher the chances of hitting that expiration date.

Let’s face it, we’ll have ice on our sidewalks every fucking year. It shouldn’t be a shock to anyone yet when I looked down at the ground for all of last week, I could still see my reflection.

How many more broken knees, hips, coccyx or arms—okay maybe that last one would have been my fault—will we need in order to get roads and sidewalks that look like roads and sidewalks? Whether this is the city’s or the university’s responsibility is irrelevant, you can’t just sit there arms crossed waiting for the other to do something.

Call me an old man shouting at a cloud, I’ll take it. But ultimately I do feel like that cloud needed a strong talking to.