from the archives: the ottawa bridge collapse that shocked the world: 'they didn't have much time to scream'
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george davis peered over the edge of the bridge and turned to his co-worker, mike graham.
“i wonder if a person would survive if he fell off this thing,” he said.
graham said he doubted it. it was almost a 20-metre drop, like jumping off a five-storey building.
it was just after three in the afternoon of aug. 10, 1966, as the pair of young construction workers stood atop the south span of the heron road bridge. when completed in two months’ time, the bridge would connect motorists on baseline road, which at the time ended at prince of wales drive, with those on heron road, and allow the public to cross the wide ravine cut away by the rideau river and canal just north of hog’s back falls.
aerial photo before the collapse, aug. 10, 1966.
citizen-upi staff photo
it was a cloudy but gorgeous summer day — 26 c with a moderate breeze blowing in from the west. workers were nearing the end of a long shift pouring some 2,000 tons of concrete on the eastern portion of the 70-metre south span. the workday was pretty much over for davis and graham who, as rodmen, or surveyors, had little to do once the concrete was being poured.
at the east end of the span, leonard baird, the construction project’s chief engineer, was talking with a few other foremen. keen to learn all he could about the trade for which he was attending college, davis decided to walk over to listen in.
the site was buzzing with activity that day, with 183 men working to complete the $2.5-million project — actually two bridges, one for eastbound traffic, one for west, each three lanes wide and nearly 300 metres long. as davis crossed to the east end of the span, another worker, crane operator assistant john robillard, was climbing the steep wooden ladder that men routinely scaled to reach to bridge deck from the gully below. as he climbed, he heard what sounded like the cracking of wood, but dismissed it as “construction noises.”
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a few minutes earlier, mike lecuyer had also climbed the same ladder. it was the 18-year-old’s second day on the job. he had been a pump jockey at bob rafter’s shell station at the corner of prince of wales drive and hog’s back road, where many of the construction workers stopped for gas. one of them, a foreman named clarence beattie, had told him that the firm responsible for building the bridge, o.j. gaffney, was looking for men, and lecuyer had leapt at the opportunity to earn two or three times the $1 minimum hourly wage.
for most of his first two days on site, lecuyer, a friend of davis’s, had worked on the north span, attaching reinforcing rods with wire ties. but at about three o’clock on wednesday, a foreman told him to go up to the south span, grab a shovel and help with the pour. in an effort to get it finished that day, a second crane had been added, and more labourers were needed.
illustration by robert cross/postmedia
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lecuyer resisted at first. he was on break and hadn’t finished the pint of milk he was drinking. “i don’t care,” he was told. “you’re finished your break.” he threw his milk down and climbed the ladder to the top, where he was paired with a portugese worker who spoke no english. the two communicated using hand gestures. little needed to be said. they stood just a few feet apart, spreading out and smoothing the wet cement dumped by the crane bucket in front of them.
elsewhere on the bridge deck, roger ménard was celebrating his 18th birthday. omer lamadeleine, a 59-year-old carpenter and father of 12, was readying to celebrate the wedding that weekend of one of his daughters. thomas daly was back on the bridge after having been fired that morning by a foreman who didn’t like the length of his hair, only to be rehired by another official.
george davis, meanwhile, had completed his walk across the bridge and stood with baird and the others, where he stayed for about 10 minutes before turning back. his surveying partner, graham, was still at the west end of the bridge and davis wanted to ask him if he felt like going to the prescott hotel after work for pizza and beer. the walk across the bridge took about two minutes. he’d only just reached the west end of the bridge when it started to shake violently.
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at 3:27 p.m., the heron road bridge collapsed.
one worker compared the noise to a jet plane passing low overhead. some said it was like a bomb exploding. others thought it sounded like a thunderclap.
it occurred with such violence and force that it registered on the dominion observatory’s seismometer on carling avenue. officials there were quick to point out it wasn’t an earthquake that had caused the bridge to collapse, but rather the other way around.
rescue workers and volunteers converged on the scene of the heron road bridge collapse, aug. 10,1966, to help find survivors and transport them to hospital.
city of ottawa archives, ottawa journal collection
workers at the heron road bridge collapse search for men trapped in the debris.
city of ottawa archives, ca02527
rescue efforts at the heron road bridge collapse, aug. 10, 1966.
citizen-upi staff photo
davis, graham, and those around them, fell more than 15 metres onto piles of wood, but lived. baird and the foremen that davis had been with just two minutes earlier were all killed when the concrete slab they were standing on flipped over as the wooden falsework supporting it gave way. they fell 20 metres to their deaths and were buried in the wet cement, concrete, lumber and steel that came crashing down with them.
“they all threw their hands up,” said worker benoit caron, 42, who was looking at the roughly 70 workers on the bridge when it gave way. “i don’t know what they were grabbing for. then they disappeared.
“the top seemed to shift a little bit,” he added, “then — poof, it dropped straight down. the men on top just rode it to the ground.”
the ride wouldn’t have lasted more than a couple of seconds: certainly not long enough for anyone to react. workman herve gratton said, with brutal simplicity: “they didn’t have much time to scream.”
davis later described it as “like standing on a bucket and having it kicked out from under you.”
crane operator paul tasse, who had been pouring concrete since 7 a.m., saw it all happen from only about three metres away. “i heard a crack and turned around. the piers (concrete columns) seemed to swing west for about a second, then everything stopped and collapsed. i saw blood all over, flying out from everywhere. everyone was running to the hill to the men. i ran up to the construction shack to call an ambulance. then i ran back down to help. i helped about 10 to 15 men to safety. some could walk, some were in shock and had to be carried. most were carried out on sheets of plywood. the men were crying and screaming and shouting. i watched them dig out three dead men from under the east column.”
rescue efforts following the heron road bridge collapse.
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graham’s body twisted around as he fell, letting him watch the bridge that was coming down with him. “all that scaffolding and concrete — it was like a movie in slow motion,” he said. “all i remember is a sinking feeling, and then i was looking up at the reinforcing rods and scaffolding still hanging up there. i was choking with dust and there was moaning and screaming all over the place.”
others were not nearly so fortunate. “screaming workmen were crushed by huge blocks,” reported the citizen, “buried alive in wet cement and skewered on steel reinforcing rods…” the front-page headline in the ottawa journal captured the nightmarish scene in just five words: “a thousand tons of terror.”
mike lecuyer knows it was only luck that saw him survive a 20-metre fall. a pair of reinforcing rods cut his right leg and his head, while others ripped his clothes to shreds. his left foot got tangled in more rods, so much so that when he hit the ground, his foot remained stuck on the rods, or rebars, above his head. he was eventually able to use his suspended leg and foot to help pull himself out.
“the cement was just pounding down on me,” he recalls, and i didn’t know how long that was going to last. have you ever played football, when the people pile on you? it felt just like that, but it was the cement dripping down.
“i fell 60 feet, but you didn’t notice it. there was cement in my hair and my face and my nose and my mouth and my eyes, and i couldn’t see. all i could hear was this ‘whoa, whoa, whoa…’ it was the reinforcing rods whipping back and forth, and every once in a while you would hear a ‘whack!’ and you knew what that was: it was hitting someone. it was like hitting a watermelon. it was a sickening sound.”
picnickers at adjacent vincent massey park were the first to arrive, some offering what help they could, followed shortly by emergency responders.
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“i knew i was alive and breathing,” lecuyer recalls, “but i had to get out of there. i was able to reach up with both hands and pull myself up, wiggling my way out. i knew something had happened, but i didn’t really know what. but i knew i had to get out of there. i panicked and started running and running and running.”
only he wasn’t — his arms were moving alright, but his legs remained motionless and, it turned out, without feeling, weighted down by wet cement.
a friend of lecuyer’s, billy o’connell, helped him out of the slowly hardening cement, and the pair went to find davis, whom they discovered near the top of a pile of lumber, blood flowing from a gash in the back of his head. they found a clean shirt and bandaged him up.
“there was blood everywhere,” lecuyer recalls. “it was pooling on the wet cement, everywhere. it was chaos.”
as workers worked to rescue their comrades, there was chaos.
united press international photo
rescue effort at the heron road bridge collapse, aug. 10, 1966.
united press international photo
rescuers pulled bodies from the wreckage, tending to the wounded and laying them on sheets of plywood where they waited for ambulances, police cars, canteen trucks — whatever — to take them to the hospital. ottawa mayor don reid arrived, wielding bolt cutters. a clown who, minutes earlier, had been performing at a children’s birthday party in the park pitched in.
a clown who had been at the scene pitches in to help.
in the disorganized tumult, lecuyer remembers watching a police cruiser that had pulled off prince of wales drive and down the embankment a bit. the young officer had helped an injured worker into the back seat and was about to drive him to the civic hospital. but he put the cruiser in drive, not reverse, so when he gave it some gas, the car roared further down the river embankment. by the time he realized his error and braked, the car had pinned lecuyer against a pile of 4×4” lumber. he had had just enough time to push davis out of the way.
“it didn’t crush my legs,” he says, “but it pinned me in there. i had no feeling in my legs anyway, but still…
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“i was slumped over the hood of the car. i was actually kind of laughing when the cop got out and said ‘are you ok? are you ok?’ and i said ‘move the car.’ and he says ‘what?’ and i said ‘move the f—ing car!’ and some woman is yelling ‘you killed him! you killed him!’ and then george kind of lost it and went after the cop. i think he thought we were under attack.
“like i said, it was chaos.”
staff at the civic learned of the accident 20 minutes after it occurred, around 3:50 p.m., when a small car pulled up to the hospital emergency entrance ramp and a blood-spattered man emerged, crying: ‘the whole bridge is coming … the whole bridge is down.’”
the timing, at least, proved somewhat fortuitous. the hospital’s day shift had just been replaced by the evening crew, and many doctors, nurses and support staff who were readying to leave stayed on to help with the deluge of wounded suffering broken and fractured bones, abrasions, lacerations, ruptured spleens and bladders, as well as spinal and cranial injuries.
reta holmes-desmarais, a 23-year-old registered nurse working her first shift in the civic’s icu, recalls the urgent pages she heard throughout the hospital, calling for various personnel. all elective surgery was cancelled to free up operating rooms. patients in units that were close to the er and icu, such as neurology, were moved to other parts of the hospital so that the bridge workers could be kept together.
“we knew something was happening,” she says. “the sound of sirens was continuous up and down carling avenue, and for the next two hours that never stopped as the injured were being transported to the hospital.”
some medical staff, meanwhile, were sent directly to the construction site to provide aid. there, the citizen reported, “knowledge that men were buried alive under hardening concrete lent a dreadful urgency to the early stages of the rescue.”
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staff at the civic faced difficulties beyond just the sheer numbers of injured arriving: many of the workers, recent arrivals from such european countries as italy and portugal, spoke little or no english and had no identification with them. additionally, norma innes, a clerk in the civic’s x-ray office, noted at the time, “you can’t tell them apart, they have so much concrete on them.
“one fellow,” she added, “had his face smashed in. he was crying, ‘my god, i can’t open my eyes … i can’t open my eyes.’”
mike lecuyer, lying on a gurney in a hallway as he awaited treatment, saw the man with whom he’d been shovelling cement only an hour earlier. the man waved to lecuyer. most of the left half of his face was gone. “and i barely had a mark, as far as that goes,” says lecuyer. “it makes you wonder. half an inch either way…”
a helicopter flew injured to hospital.
citizen-upi staff photo
staff at the civic hospital tend to the workers injured.
united pressinternational photo
holmes-desmarais found herself praying that she would never again in her career do some of the things she had to that day, like hanging blood for transfusions without a patient’s name attached.
“especially as a young nurse, you’re taught they must have a name, they must have their date-of-birth, they must be able to respond to you when you ask these questions, so that you are sure that the blood, particularly with blood transfusions, belongs to this person. and on that day we just did the best we could to identify each person according to the papers.
“one patient that i remember, he just had a black ‘26’ written on his chest with marker, and so the description was ‘no. 26, black hair and has a large mole on left shoulder.’ we would do our second check with another registered nurse before hanging the blood, and look at each other for assurance and finish the task.
“it was a challenging day.”
assessment, she recalls, was ongoing. as red blood cells broke down from the massive contusions and bruising, for example, the bilirubin they produced turned affected areas yellow. “so we had patients looking jaundiced, and would wonder if they had liver damage.”
rescue efforts at the heron road bridge collapse, aug. 10, 1966, continued well into the following morning.
citizen-upi staff photo
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doctors at the civic performed at least 20 major operations, including a failed open-heart massage, that day, with half a dozen procedures going on at any one time. the hospital ran out of stretchers and bandages, resorting to tearing up bedsheets for the latter.
thomas daly, who had been fired and rehired that morning, still had a rebar through his right arm and shoulder when he arrived. he spent an hour-and-a-half trapped with five other men in the concrete and debris before rescue workers found them. he listened as the others prayed in different languages. beside him, bridge engineer leonard baird lay dead. it took nearly a year for daly to recover from his injuries; he returned the following july to help complete the project.
omer lamadeleine did not survive the fall. on saturday, instead of attending his daughter’s wedding, he was buried.
while men were treated at the civic, medical staff at the construction site gave morphine injections to workers who were still trapped. george larose, a chaplain with the ottawa fire department, administered the last rites to others. amid the rubble, signs that had been affixed to the bridge grimly reminded onlookers and rescuers that it was construction safety month. “remember … safety is a man’s job,” read one.
in one of the day’s most dramatic scenes, george veigas, 37, spent two hours neck-deep in cement and steel as eight rescue workers frantically tried to free him. directly above, a large concrete block dangled from the wreckage, as welders with acetylene torches cut away the reinforcing rods surrounding veigas. a bucket line formed, with workers using hard hats to bring water up from the river, to keep veigas cool and to prevent the rods from burning him as they were heated. dr. a.j. quarrington, among the doctors and interns who had arrived from the civic, joined in the rescue efforts, scooping out wet concrete with his bare hands, while the amputation of one of veigas’s feet was considered as a measure to free him. veigas’s arms and face were massaged as he fell unconscious, and it was eventually discovered that efforts to rescue him were being hampered by the arms of a dead worker clamped around his legs. he was freed at 5:30 p.m. and flown by rcaf helicopter to the national defence tri-services hospital.
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(general hospital surgeon dr. bernard lefebvre was critical that day of the fact that only two of the injured were sent to the general — now elisabeth bruyère — while two others went to the national defence medical centre. the first victim arrived at the general at 4:30 p.m., and staff waited two hours for a deluge that never came.)
more than one-third of the 183 workers were treated at the hospital. many others, terrified, simply ran or swam away from the site immediately following the collapse. it wasn’t until the following day that everyone was accounted for. rescue efforts, meanwhile, continued until about 3:30 a.m., when exhausted crane operator paul tasse felt it was no longer safe to continue. seven men died at the site, while another succumbed at the civic. a ninth victim, 52-year-old lucien regimbald, who was admitted with a suspected fractured pelvis and facial injuries, died in september of internal injuries.
more than 60 workers were injured.
among the dead was 35-year-old foreman clarence beattie, who had told lecuyer of the job opening a few days earlier. a father of five children ages three to nine, beattie’s death was examined in the subsequent coroner’s inquest as a proxy for all the men who died in the accident.
two deficiencies were revealed to have caused the accident. the wood used in the bracing, or falsework, for the concrete pour was green and thus too weak to withstand the load. additionally, the falsework, the design of which had changed three times before being approved, lacked the necessary diagonal supports.
and while the bridge contract clearly laid responsibility for the falsework with contractor o.j. gaffney ltd., the inquest added that blame also rested with design consultant m.m dillon co.
contractor oliver gaffney leaves the inquest into the heron road bridge collapse, nov. 25, 1966.
citizen-upi staff photo
testifying at the inquest, project engineer john bromley, who was in charge of the structural design work for dillon’s ottawa projects, assumed sole responsibility for failing to notice the absence of diagonal bracing. “my mind must have been a bit confused at the time,” he said. “i cannot understand it myself. i consider this a criticism of myself.”
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“i hold myself guilty for not having noticed it.”
engineer bromley at the inquest into the heron road bridge collapse.
citizen-upi staff photo
bromley was eventually suspended by the association of professional engineers of ontario for one year, as was fellow engineer robert mctavish. a third engineer, bernard houston, received a reprimand.
contractor o.j. gaffney ltd., meanwhile, was fined $5,000, the maximum then allowed under the construction safety act. the inquest did, however, recommend numerous changes that were incorporated into the act.
at the heron road bridge collapse inquest, november 1966.
united press international photo
the bridge was rebuilt the following year. in 1987, a plaque was erected on heron road, at the southwest corner of the bridge.
last month, the city voted in favour of a proposal initiated by the ottawa and district labour council and put forth by coun. riley brockington, to rename it the heron road workers’ memorial bridge. a renaming and dedication ceremony is scheduled for 12:15 p.m. on wednesday, at the site of the current plaque.
reta holmes-desmarais, meanwhile, admits it took a couple or more years before she could hear sirens and not flash back to that august day.
mike lecuyer spent months following the collapse with concrete embedded in his back. his mother regularly applied baby oil, then worked at getting some off, bit by bit. “they were worried it would take the skin off,” lecuyer recalls. “i had to learn to walk again because everything was screwed up. i was off for about a year. my doctor said i’d have been better off if something actually broke.” he says that at a subsequent workman’s compensation board hearing, he was asked to remove his shirt while a wcb doctor poked at the cement before accusing him of deliberately putting it there himself. “they didn’t want to pay.”
after about a year, he returned to the gas station, then tried his hand once more at construction, when in 1968 he worked on the construction of highland park high school — now notre dame — on broadview avenue. there, a co-worker carrying a 16-foot plank knocked him two storeys to the ground, where he was fortunate to land in sand.
mike lecuyer survived the heron road bridge collapse of aug. 10, 1966.
bruce deachman
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“i freaked on the guy,” he recalls. “everything came back to me and i literally went up the girder and chased after him with a hammer. that was my last week in construction. i said, ‘enough of this. i wasn’t meant to work in construction.’”
the following year he got a job with the city, in the water and sewers department. “that was high enough for me,” he jokes now.
for decades he required chiropractic treatment, and developed claustrophobia. and while at a rod stewart concert years ago at lansdowne park, he had to leave when the sensation of the northside stands vibrating under the weight of the dancing crowd got to be too much. “i kept thinking, ‘it’s going down, it’s going down. i’ve got to get out of here.’”
these days, he can’t cross over the heron bridge without it all coming back to him. “it makes me appreciate the life that i have,” he says. “i think about the things that i would have missed. it might sound crazy, but the people i’ve met, the places i’ve been, the friends that i have. that would have been gone; i never would have experienced it. it kind of opens your eyes.”
george davis’s stay at the civic hospital 50 years ago was mercifully short: a dentist closed the wound on the back of his head with four stitches and sent him home, where he never heard from his employer again. his goal of a career on construction sites ended that day, however. he worked in building design and property management for the federal government for 32 years. “it’s a hell of a lot shorter to fall off a drafting-table stool than the top of a bridge,” he says. “this type of work is dangerous, and sometimes you don’t have any control over what happens. sixty or 70 people rode that bridge down, and not one of them had any knowledge or control over that. that was fate.
“i was one of the lucky ones. some of the guys had pretty serious injuries and their lives were significantly altered. mine wasn’t. i feel like the guy who missed his flight that crashed.
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had he not decided to walk over to the engineer and foremen and listen to their discussion that day, things might well have ended differently.
“every time i cross that bridge,” says davis, “i think of that two minutes. so far it’s given me 50 years. it was that two-minute walk that changed my life forever. pretty lucky, eh?”
george davis survived the heron road bridge collapse of aug. 10, 1966.
bruce deachman
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