Off the 'Cuff

This summer, our summer students are regularly updating this blog with their experiences working at the Police Museum. Wren is one of our fantastic summer programming staff who will be running our forensics workshops for kids.

June 17th, 1958.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

This date probably doesn’t mean anything to you. Even if you live and work in Vancouver, and perhaps unknowingly pass the memorial plaque where this date is emblazoned in bronze. Even if you’ve heard about it, maybe vaguely remember a story or two, you probably do not remember the date the Second Narrows Bridge collapsed.

But it is a date that will never be forgotten by the men and women working in the Coroner’s Court that afternoon.

Glen McDonald, Chief Coroner for the city of Vancouver, was at a restaurant when he heard the news. He looked out the window, across the city, to witness the devastation first-hand. “It was an unbelievable sight,” he remembers in his memoir, How Come I’m Dead?, “But there it was.” Though it seemed impossible that such a huge structure could fall so completely, it was a reality which the Coroner had to quickly accept, and to even more quickly respond.

The Second Narrows Bridge was in full-swing construction mode when it fell – eighteen people were crushed or drowned, twenty were grievously injured, and a total of seventy-nine workers plunged the two-hundred and ten feet into the freezing waters below. There was no room at the hospital morgue for so many bodies, so they were sent instead to the Vancouver City Morguet, which now houses our own museum. There was room in the morgue for only ten or twelve bodies at a time, but they had extra space in the basement, and bodies were kept there until they could be identified.

The process of identification was challenging. Many of the workers had been crushed under huge steel beams. McDonald remembers, “Some were no longer human. They looked like abstract Picasso paintings. Twisted, garish, unreal… The memories of that night still haunt me.” The morgue attendants had to resort to creative means to identify the bodies – from dental records to the brand of cigarettes left in their cover-all pockets.

Many people questioned what failure in oversight had led to this terrible tragedy. Could the bridge’s collapse have been prevented? An inquest was held, in our own Coroner’s Court, now the main gallery of our museum. It was where that the jury learned that a company engineer had been on the bridge at the time of the collapse; he had been taking measurements because someone had raised concerns that the bridge had shifted – he was trying to ascertain if there was any danger. He died that day, as the bridge fell. Thanks to that inquest, recommendations were adopted that changed the way steel truss bridges were built, and those same rules help to protect our modern bridgeworkers. And so, in 1994, the Second Narrows Bridge was renamed The Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, to honour those who lost their lives.

So how does this story touch us today? Every engineer in Canada wears an iron ring on their pinky finger. There is a legend that says those rings were once made from the iron of Vancouver’s fallen bridge. During a secret ceremony called the Ritual of Calling an Engineer, the ring is given as a reminder of the responsibility engineers have. They should build safely, not for monetary gain but for the science and art of their craft.

Sadly, the legend is not entirely true: while both ceremony and ring are real, they are not directly related to the Ironworkers of Vancouver; nor are they related to the iron bridge of Quebec, another persistent myth. Still, the fact that the legend still thrives tells us that some Canadians have kept the memory of our Ironworkers alive.

“Grief comes in many forms,” Glen McDonald says in his book, “and we ran into pretty much all of them that night.” For the families of those who died fifty-two years ago today, there is a plaque on the new Second Narrows Bridge. The plaque bears the words, “In memory of those who lost their lives in the process of construction of this, the Second Narrows Bridge.”

And for those for whom a small plaque up high on a bridge is not enough, there is a myth that inspires each new generation of engineers. And there is a small brick building on East Cordova Street, where a team of historians feels a personal attachment to those who died 52 years ago.

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