Dark memories of a tragic day
‘It’s never going to go away,’ says worker who survived 1958 collapse of Second Narrows Bridge
It has been 60 years since the massive steel girders in the northern section of the Second Narrows Bridge broke and tumbled into the churning waters of Burrard Inlet, taking with them 79 workers.
All it takes is a warm day, a view of the inlet and the sound of ambulances to bring Gary Poirier back to that afternoon on June 17, 1958, when he survived the worst industrial accident in Vancouver’s history.
“It’s never going to go away,” said Poirier, tears in his voice. “It’s a memory I can’t forget.”
Poirier was 18, an apprentice ironworker six months on the job. He had just crawled out from a girder and was heading to a ladder to climb to the top of the bridge when he felt the bridge give way underneath his feet.
“I thought ‘the bridge is falling down,’” he said. “I figured everything was going to fall apart. I thought, I’m dead.”
Poirier survived the 30-metre plunge, hanging on to his torn life-jacket, injured but alive. He clung on to a piling of the old Second Narrows Bridge until two doctors who were out fishing and responded to the disaster plucked him out of the water.
“I was so fortunate,” Poirier said, now 78. “If it went down even one minute sooner, I was inside a steel girder and that would have been it for sure. The good Lord looked after me that day.”
Others were not so lucky. Nineteen people died, including 14 ironworkers, three engineers, a painter and a scuba diver who died trying to recover a body.
Foreman Lou Lessard was tossed from the top of the bridge into the sea, dark and muddied by sediment kicked up by the crashed bridge. The impact of the fall ripped his life-jacket off of him.
“I couldn’t see what was happening,” recalled the 89-year-old Langley resident. “I didn’t know where to go. I followed some daylight coming through the water,” and swam for the surface, clinging to floating debris before being rescued.
Lessard, Poirier and Norm Atkinson, 97, who lives in the Okanagan, are the three remaining ironworkers who survived the collapse that day.
Their stories are among those immortalized in a new documentary film by George Orr based on never-before-seen colour footage shot by young draftsman Peter Hall who was hired to document the construction of the bridge.
Hall was five minutes late to the construction site that fateful day, and captured the aftermath of the accident.
The footage — 3,000 feet of pristine 16-mm film from the pouring of the concrete to the cutting of the ribbon during the bridge’s completion in 1960 — has languished in storage until Orr read Hall’s story in a community paper last year and got in touch.
“No one has seen that footage in nearly 60 years,” said Orr, a former TV news reporter and BCIT instructor. As a documentary filmmaker, “this was sunken treasure.”
The Bridge debuts on Sunday at the Vancity Theatre, with four screenings to follow.
“This story is fading away 60 years later,” said Orr. “(The film) is a way to bring it back.”
A royal commission into the collapse found it was a result of human error.
A junior engineer made a miscalculation and underestimated the load-carrying ability of a temporary support. His superior failed to catch the error. Both men died in the collapse.
Doug Parton of the Ironworkers Local 97 said they are hoping for a large turnout at the 60th anniversary memorial to honour the fallen men.
Poirier, Lessard and Atkinson, who suffered shattered bones, broken legs and other injuries, went back to the job after months of recovery.