The grim legacy of L’Ambiance Plaza
Last Tuesday, as has been the practice now for the last 36 years, the men who erect buildings gathered in Bridgeport to remember the 28 workers, a boy among them, who died on April 23 1987 when L’Ambiance Plaza, the apartment towers the doomed workers were erecting, crashed down on them.
Each year, of course, the number of people who survived the accident or who lived through it in one way or another dwindles with the passage of time.
But a stout chain of labor leaders continues to rally folks together every April 23 to reinforce the message of workplace safety.
In the early afternoon of April 23, 1987, the partially built L’Ambiance Plaza, what was to have been a two-tower, 218-unit apartment building being erected with a sincebanned technique called “lift-slab,” pancaked down on the workers there. Death, the experts concluded later, was at least mercifully swift.
The message delivered Tuesday by speakers who included Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, state Sen. Tony Hwang, Bridgeport Mayor Joseph P. Ganim and former Mayor Thomas W. Bucci, who was in office in 1987, was that it’s the responsibility of elected leaders, not just unions, to enforce rules that assure workers who leave their loved ones in the morning, return home at the end of the day.
Fierce loyalty is a trademark in the union world, and particularly in the building trades, a way of life that can be more dangerous than others. Never was it more visible than in the horrible 10 days that followed the L’Ambiance collapse.
Union workers from all over Connecticut worked around the clock — first in hopeful rescue mode, but then in grim recovery mode. Family members kept emotionally exhausting vigil in a nearby school gymnasium.
Kevin Byrnes, then a 29-year-old iron worker, was on another job, a trash-to-energy plant in Bridgeport, not far from L’Ambiance. Byrnes, who now lives in Reston, Va., recently retired as chief of staff in Washington to Ironworkers International
General President Eric Dean. Byrnes remembers the day.
“A cop car pulled into our job and the guy said, ‘Hey, you should know that L’Ambiance just collapsed,’ ” Byrnes recalled. He and brothers from ironworkers Local 424, based in North Haven, raced to the site. Other 424 members were at work on the People’s Bank building downtown. They, too, raced to the scene.
The scene was devastating. One of Byrnes’ union brothers, Pete Ward, of Fairfield, sat holding the body of his son, Scott, a high school student who had joined his father on the job.
Twenty years later, as one of the organizers of the annual memorial service, along with Tom Wilkinson, of Fairfield, then president of the Fairfield County Labor Council, Byrnes stood at the podium. He recalled, “I saw some young girls in the audience and they were crying. They came up to me later and said ‘thank you’ for doing this for our father.”
He paused. “They never knew their father.”
The current keeper of the L’Ambiance flame is Dan McInerney, of Trumbull, president of the Fairfield County Building & Construction Trades Council and business agent of Local 488, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, based in Monroe. He took over from Peter Carroll. Last week, on a sparkling spring morning, McInerney presided over the proceedings outside Bridgeport City Hall, 45 Lyon Terrace, a stone’s throw from the
Washington Avenue site of what remains the deadliest construction accident ever in Connecticut
McInerney was a volunteer during the 10 days it took to recover the dead at the site.
“This affected an entire community,” he said after Tuesday’s ceremony. “The weather was miserable but people kept coming down wanting to help, bringing clothes,” he said. “It gave you faith in what a community can do. I see now that family members bring the next generation.”
In the aftermath of the accident, labor and political leaders, including Connecticut Congressman Christopher Shays, IBEW International Vice President Frank Carroll, and ironworker union head Joe Egan, went to Washington and successfully lobbied for a ban on lift-slab construction, a process in which the concrete floors of a building were poured at ground level and jacked up into position. It was later determined that the failure of one of the collars holding an upper floor in place was the cause of the catastrophic collapse.
The collapse also led to the opening of a Bridgeport office of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
The act that established OSHA went into effect on April 28, 1971 and April 28 remains Workers Memorial Day in the United States.
Wilkinson, retired president of Local 371, United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, said he
thought the L’Ambiance tragedy deserved a day of its own and that the commemoration should be in Bridgeport.
Working with Byrnes, they got the day rolling.
It was Hwang who last Tuesday first mentioned the name of David Wheeler, the wiry iron worker who was on the People’s job, and over the 10-day rescue/recovery period became a “mole,” one of two men who slithered between the precariously tilted slabs of concrete looking for bodies.
The experience traumatized Wheeler and when he died he was recognized as the 29th victim of the catastrophe.
Ed Hawthorne, president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO based in Rocky Hill, spoke Tuesday and noted there wasn’t much point to bargaining for better wages and benefits if workers weren’t going to live to enjoy them. That some employers will continue to put profit ahead of safety is an insidious lingering reality, he said.
Hawthorne, as his predecessor, the fiery John Olsen, did at many a L’Ambiance memorial, cited the exhortation of early 20th-century labor activist Mary “Mother” Jones. She was born in 1837 in Cork, Ireland — some Irish know the area as “Rebel Cork” — and in 1902 gave this admonishment to a group of grieving miners:
“Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”