Paul Charette had just finished a locksmithing job at the Rideau Centre and was returning to the van he had parked outside when he first encountered the sinkhole. It had opened up, a giant, yawning maw, between him and the company car, a dark blue Dodge Caravan. Charette had rolled the van to a stop in front of what was then a Chapters, on the north side of Rideau Street just east of Sussex Avenue. Now that van was poised on the very lip of the spreading abyss.
It was June 8, 2016 — 10 years ago. What unfolded in the ensuing minutes would make headlines around the world. According to Charette, his then-boss Michel Kiwan, owner of First Choice Locksmith, urged him to retrieve the van quickly. "Go get the van, go get the van, don't lose the van," Charette remembers Kiwan telling him. He set out for the vehicle but says he was stopped by the fire marshal. "I waited for him to leave, then I started walking towards the van," Charette says. "That's when I got stopped by, like, four police officers along with the marshal."
Over the course of the morning the sinkhole eventually grew to stretch from between 45 Rideau St. and 47-57 Rideau St. on the north side and between 10 Rideau St. and 50 Rideau St. on the south, spanning the whole of the street's 25-metre width and measuring some 20 metres in length. It was fast. Within minutes it had sucked down the van and the life Charette had lived inside it. He had spent the better part of 13 years working out of it and its predecessor. It was transportation and his mobile workshop. "My whole life was in there," he says.
He saw it drop from where authorities had pushed him, across Sussex outside Milestones restaurant. As he watched the sinkhole spread and the road collapse under the weight of the van, Charette felt helpless. He did all that was left for him to do. "I was there with the remote with the keys and I was pressing the alarm," he says. A bystander behind him asked what he was doing. "I'm like, 'That's my van!'" They both watched it disappear. Charette was sounding the van's alarm and remembers shouting: "It's gone! It's gone!"
The whole mess remains down the hole today, encased in cement, an accidental time capsule dedicated to just one man. Charette's wallet is there. Five pieces of government-issued ID. "If they dig that up in 100 years, they're probably gonna find it," he says.
Images of the Rideau-Sussex intersection, taken from above and showing a jagged doorway into Ottawa's underworld rather than workaday Rideau Street, circulated globally. But for this city it was not exactly unfamiliar territory. And a decade later, we still live with the spectre of what lies beneath us and the mysterious holes that sometimes appear to show us what is there.
