After a devastating flood last week, researchers at the Lehmann Centre at the Douglas Hospital say they have been raising concerns for years about the decrepit state of the building.
“This building should have been demolished years ago,” said McGill University Psychiatry professor Sylvain Williams. Williams has worked as a researcher at the Lehmann Centre for about 30 years.
“Unfortunately, it has not because there were no other alternatives. We have been asking for a new building, a new hospital. But nothing has moved forward,” Williams told Global News on Monday.
On Jan. 26, several pipes in the Lehmann building burst, causing widespread flooding and damage. Phone video shot during the flood shows ceilings collapsing as water gushes into laboratories.
Researcher Mark Brandon says it took him a decade to build his laboratory. He says was completely destroyed.
“It’s kind of indescribable how much we lost,” said Brandon, an associate professor of psychiatry at McGill University. “It’s not just a financial value. A lot of time went into this creatively, building up that lab space, so it’s devastating.”
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Williams estimates about 100 researchers and students used the Lehmann building, working in around 15 laboratories in a structure that dates back to the late 1800s. He says most people have been relocated to work in other areas of the Douglas Hospital, but laboratory work has largely stalled.
Williams says many students and researchers have grant application deadlines coming up that will be hard to meet.
“They are all on a time schedule. They need to write papers, they need to graduate. So this is all up in the air right now. We don’t know what will happen,” he said.
The research institute is considered one of the leading centres in the world for Alzheimer’s and mental health research.
Brandon says the flood will cause major setbacks.
“If people in Montreal and Quebec wonder where is the research being conducted to find better therapies, it’s here and it’s in the building that was just destroyed,” Brandon said.
Williams says administrators and the local health agency started discussing plans to replace the hospital and research centres about 30 years ago, when he started there. He said that as recently as 2022, there were plans to replace the aging structures at a cost of more than $1 billion. He says those plans were eventually shelved, leaving researchers to start from scratch.
Williams says the Lehmann Centre should have been demolished years ago and worries the government will continue patching up structural problems instead of investing in a state-of-the-art facility.
“These events have been occurring over and over for the past 20 years. We have been warning the administration that we need to do something serious about this. Unfortunately, there have been band-aids on top of band-aids all these years, so it’s a serious setback,” Williams said. “In summer, the labs are 35 C and 10 C in winter. And you have wild mice running around. It does not make sense to keep going in this building. We definitely need a new building and a new hospital.”
In a statement to Global News, Myriam Paquet of the CIUSSS de l’Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal said:
“We are currently in the process of working with the Direction des assurances du réseau de la santé et des services sociaux (DARSSS) to assess the extent of the damage. We are also working with the CNESST to ensure the safety of the premises for our staff and students.”