PAINFUL ANNIVERSARY
‘It’s still difficult’ a decade after de la Concorde overpass collapse
Around 11:30 a.m., 10 years ago Friday, the first 911 calls started coming in from drivers along Highway 19 in Laval.
The calls varied in tone and length, but were all for the same reason: people could see concrete debris either falling from the de la Concorde Blvd. overpass or already on the ground below.
A Transport Quebec highway patroller was dispatched to inspect the structure and recover pieces of concrete from the highway’s shoulder. Neither the highway nor the overpass was closed.
An hour after the calls started, a 20-metre section of the overpass collapsed in what was later described as a “violent and spontaneous” moment, killing five people below and injuring six who were on it.
“It’s still difficult,” France Leclaire said this week from her home in the Eastern Townships, where she moved to from Laval, in part to get away from the memories the city still triggers.
Leclaire lost her ex-husband and father of her two children, Gilles Hamel, in the collapse. Her children were 15 and 17 at the time.
They’re in their late 20s now, Leclaire said, and at ages where they’re going to want their father around for specific events — to walk her daughter down the aisle at her wedding, she said, or to meet her son’s first child.
“There’s a lot I can do as a mother, but I can’t replace their father.”
The decade since has been worth forgetting, Leclaire said.
She couldn’t mourn until her children had, so she buried herself in work until her “body couldn’t take it anymore.”
She fell into a deep depression, and went through a one-year court battle with Quebec’s automobile insurance board to work out the money she and her children received.
She said she saw the news last week that Gabriel Hamel, eight years old at the time of the collapse that killed his two parents — Sylvie Beaudet and Leclaire’s ex-husband’s brother Jean-Pierre Hamel — was denouncing the fact that no government official had ever publicly apologized or accepted responsibility.
“It’s always been very hard to accept that everyone buried their heads in the sand and no one took responsibility,” Leclaire said.
During a news conference on Sunday, Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard apologized on behalf of the government to all the relatives and friends of victims “who still live with all the pain that this incident has caused.”
But for some, like Claude Giroux, there’s still a sense of a lack of accountability.
Giroux, 55, lived and ran his chiropractor business a few metres away from the overpass when it collapsed. His office was closed for a month, and nearly impossible to reach for nine months.
He couldn’t sleep at night while the overpass was being rebuilt for nine months, he said. He still remembers the sound of the guardrails being installed — “Bang! Bang! Bang!” — all night long as hundreds of steel beams were planted through cement.
He ended up going bankrupt and suffered a burnout, he said.
He sued Quebec’s Transport Department (MTQ), and though he said he couldn’t legally discuss the outcome of the case, it was only settled eight months ago.
“Almost 10 years later,” he said this week, adding how he never received a phone call from anyone — “not a minister, a deputy minister, a technician, or anyone from the MTQ,”—to apologize for his troubles.
A year-long inquiry into the collapse, headed by former Quebec premier Pierre-Marc Johnson, concluded in 2007 that no single entity was to blame for what happened. It was the result of a “sequential chain of causes.”
The Johnson Commission did, however, blame the MTQ for “systemic failures” over a number of years that prevented it from understanding how deteriorated the overpass was and taking the necessary steps to fix it.
“It was an extremely unfortunate incident and we’ve learned a lot of lessons from it,” MTQ spokesperson Sarah Bensadoun said this week. “There was a change in mentality afterwards. We don’t work the same way at all.”
Bensadoun said the MTQ has modified the way it operates at nearly every level of the provincial agency.
“We’ve reinforced certain aspects, and became much more severe on others. We clarified some of our standards. And we enforced much greater requirements, particularly when it comes to inspecting structures.”
Bridges and overpasses are now inspected every two-to-three years, she said, instead of five-to-six years, as a result.
Of the 17 recommendations the Johnson Commission made, Bensadoun said 12 have been completed, while the other five are either ongoing or still being researched (such as the digitalization of each bridge or overpass dossier).
Bensadoun said the MTQ has also surpassed Johnson’s recommendation that at least $500 million a year for the next decade be spent on repairing thousands of bridges and overpasses in the province.
In the wake of the collapse, Quebec’s Order of Engineers opened 12 investigations, interviewing dozens of witnesses and reviewing thousands of documents dating back to when the overpass was first built.
Eleven of the investigations were closed without any disciplinary complaints being lodged; one engineer pleaded guilty in 2015 to two disciplinary charges unrelated to his work on the overpass, but for providing contradictory information during the order’s investigation and to the Johnson Commission.
“The order’s mission is to protect the public,” spokesperson Patrick Leblanc said this week. “Given the rule changes and corrections made in light of the Johnson Commission recommendations, the circumstances that led to the collapse should not happen again today.”
The city of Laval does not have any official ceremonies planned for the anniversary.
The families of the six people who were injured but survived the collapse told the Montreal Gazette they didn’t want to talk about the last 10 years and are still trying to move on with their lives. At least one, who suffered a serious back injury, has never been able to return to work.
“I live with the pain every day,” the man said. “There’s nothing left to say.”
Leclaire said it will be hard not to think about her children’s father knowing that Friday marks 10 years since he died, so they’re planning on visiting his grave at the cemetery where he’s buried in Laval over the weekend.
Giroux ended up relocating both his home and business, but only seven buildings down from where he was. He can see the new overpass from where he is.
“My life is here,” he said of not relocating elsewhere. “I saw that overpass built. I saw that overpass collapse, and I saw it be rebuilt.”
He’s focused on moving forward now, he said. He was on the overpass this week, watching the cars below and thinking back to what happened.
“When you see a bridge like that collapse and cause what it did, you realize how small we are in life,” he said. “Everything else continues around you, and to others today, it’s as if nothing ever happened.”