June 17, 1958, was a perfect summer day, sunny and hot. Workers building the new Second Narrows Bridge were nearing the end of their shift when, suddenly, a span 20 storeys above Burrard Inlet began to shake.
“Some of the men on it ran,” reported The Vancouver Sun. “Some clung to the girders.
“Then, with a crash that could be heard in downtown Vancouver, it swung down like a pendulum and slammed into the bottom of the sea.
“Clinging ironworkers flicked off like flies. The falling mass pulled its inshore supporting pillar out, (which) allowed (a second) span to fall like its partner.”
A survivor estimated that the collapse lasted only 25 seconds, but it sent 18 men hurtling to their deaths, and injured 20 more.
John Olynyk was one of the lucky ones. Olynyk was inside a “big, criss-crossed diagonal beam” when the span collapsed. He miraculously survived the fall and crawled to the top of the beam, but the tide started to come in. Then “the water came up and up and up,” and he thought he only had five minutes to live.
But a crew of six welders spotted him. Clambering onto a work boat, wrote The Sun’s Tom Ardies: “They put their torches to the steel cage that held him. They burned it away piece by piece, and pulled him out at the last minute.
“ ‘We worked like hell to save his life,’ said welder Jim Fullager. ’He just stared at us, without a word.’ ”
The welders pulled eight men out of the wreckage. But only two were alive.
A diver later died searching for bodies in the twisted metal underwater, bringing the final death toll to 19. Among the dead were two engineers that had miscalculated the strength of the “grillage” on a platform. A royal commission into the disaster said the miscalculations “meant the beams of the platform were used without stiffeners and supports which would have been found necessary if the calculation had been made correctly.”
It was a fatal mistake.
Monday 17 june 2013
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/THIS+HISTORY+JUNE+1958/8533871/story.html
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