Gary Poirier, a 19-year-old apprentice ironworker went to work in Vancouver on June 17, 1958.
He had been hired to help build the Second Narrows Bridge and he was delighted to be at a good paying job that gave him the training he hoped to use in his future career.
As he stood on the bridge, he watched the cranes moving pieces and noted that the wind was steadily blowing.
The great machines wobbled a bit, but that was nothing out of the ordinary.
He was wearing a lifejacket which was a bit snug, and he received some gentle ribbing about wearing it from veteran coworkers, but it was something that made him feel safe.
As he looked out into the harbour, he heard a loud snap and then everything around him shook.
Where there was once a solid bridge beneath his feet, now there was nothing but air.
Poirier was falling 30 metres to the water’s surface and when he reached it, he dove five meters under it before he was swept away in the current.
The life jacket he was wearing was torn away from his body by the force of the fall but luckily, he grabbed onto a nearby piece of lumber.
Through sheer luck, he drifted to a boat and was pulled from the water into the local doctor’s private boat.
Poirier was lucky.
He made it home that night.
18 others did not.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today I share the tragic story of the Second Narrows Bridge collapse!
The history of the Second Narrows Bridge begins almost a century earlier with Sir George Henry Richards.
He served the Royal British Navy, throughout the world, including the First Opium War in China.
He was a skilled captain and was widely respected.
By 1857 he had spent 22 years in the Navy.
When the British began surveying the area around present-day Vancouver, they tapped Sir George for the job.
He was given two ships, HMS Plumper and HMS Hecate, and they set sail as the British Commissioner of the San Juan Islands Boundary Commission.
When he reached the area that would become the city of Vancouver, he named the surrounding landscape as part of the survey.
The Sunshine Coast, that was him.
False Creek, his too.
And when he came to two narrow passages in Burrard Inlet, he dug deep and creatively came up with appropriate and meaningful names for what he saw.
He came up with…are you ready?
First Passage.
Second Passage.
I know… truly groundbreaking…
Anyways the name stuck and half a century later the area became the City of Vancouver which was developing quickly as it became a major port on the west coast of North America.
As ships grew in size, The Narrows needed to be, well …less narrow, In 1911, the DGS Mastodon arrived from Scotland and began enlarging the waterway to accommodate those bigger vessels.
For the next six years, the crew of the ship worked in shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week to dredge the entire channel.
Over five million tons of excavated material such as clay, rocks and boulders, was removed.
This project widened the narrows from 270 metres to 430 metres and allowed for increased ship traffic into Vancouver Harbour.
The project also did immense environmental damage to the river’s ecosystem.
Around this same time, John Lawson, John Sinclair, William Thompson and Robert McPherson established a ferry service across the Narrows.
With a converted fishing boat, they could transport 35 passengers across the water.
Unfortunately, it was not profitable, and the business was purchased by the City of West Vancouver, and overtime they upgraded to larger vessels that could carry 120 passengers.
The ferry service filled a need, but the City of Vancouver was growing faster than they could accommodate.
Between 1911 and 1931, the city grew from 100,000 people to 246,000 and more new residents were arriving daily.
The ferry service couldn’t handle the increased number of travellers.
A bridge was needed.
In the early-1930s, Alfred Taylor, a local engineer who owned land near the Narrows area convinced residents that a bridge would benefit them all.
It would benefit him the most since he owned land where this proposed bridge would be built.
Taylor also convinced Walter Guinness, a member of the wealthy Guinness family…owners of the black stuff from Ireland to invest and help build the bridge.
Guinness purchased 1,902 hectares of the West Vancouver mountainside to begin the project.
On Dec. 13, 1933, a plebiscite was held and it passed with 70 percent in support of a bridge.
The federal government then granted their approval with two requirements.
Bridge construction to use Vancouver labour and materials.
It was hoped this would alleviate some of the unemployment in the city at the time.
The second stipulation was that no person of Asian descent was to be employed in any part of the construction process.
This blatantly racist rule was based on bigotry where many residents believed Chinese and Japanese Canadians were stealing jobs.
For more on that, listen to my episode from 2023 about the Anti-Asiatic Riot of 1907 that left Vancouver’s Chinatown in ruins.
But back to the bridge…Construction began on March 31, 1937, and the bridge opened on Nov. 14, 1938.
Originally called The First Narrows Bridge, today it is better known as The Lions Gate Bridge.
Vancouver residents could now easily drive over the Narrows using the bridge, but within twenty years, the rise of the automobile meant the need for a new bridge to be built.
Enter…. The star of today’s story…. The Second Narrows Bridge.
In the early-1950s, British Columbia and much of Canada agreed to build the Trans-Canada Highway connecting the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
I just finished writing my first history book about the history of the Trans-Canada Highway and if you’ll indulge me in shameless self promotion, you’ll find it in bookstores in late-2025.
British Columbia’s commitment to the highway had to meet federal specifications. The Lions Gate Bridge on the west end of downtown and went through Stanley Park and that wouldn’t work for the Trans-Canada Highway route.
The province wanted to bypass the congested downtown and a new bridge was proposed that would take travellers through Burnaby, and across the Narrows eight kilometres east of the Lions Gate Bridge.
This path would take the Trans-Canada Highway through the Lower Mainland on its way towards Vancouver Island.
The feds agreed to pay half of the $20 million cost for the bridge’s construction which officially began on July 12, 1956.
Minister of Health and Welfare Eric Martin tripped a lever to start the official concrete pour at the site.
As the concrete poured out, everyone cheered, and several members of the construction crews watched the ceremony.
They could have never known that some of them would never get to see the bridge completed.
From the very beginning…. Death lurked around the Second Narrows Bridge
In May 1956, two months before construction officially started, Alexandi Haucus was killed when he was electrocuted while doing some preliminary work at the site.
Just over eight months later in February 1957, Alexander Robertson was killed when a piece of lumber fell off the bridge and struck him in the head.
Two months later on April 16, 1957, Sid Belliveau was working on a tugboat nearby as drilling work was done.
Everything was going fine until the tugboat was suddenly hit broadside by a tiderip and flipped over before anyone had a chance to react.
Belliveau drowned in the Narrows, while another worker, Eugene Jackson, barely escaped Jackson said,
“I’m about an average swimmer. I don’t know how I made it. All I know is that somehow, I managed to get out of the rough water. Can’t tell you how far I swam. They tell me it was about 75 yards. Anyway, it sure was a long way.”
Even the skies weren’t safe from the darkness… On July 1, 1957, a light plane piloted by Joseph De Moore crashed near the site.
The bridge wasn’t the cause of the crash, but it seemed to draw death towards it.
On Aug. 30, 1957, a car carrying four Longshore workers drove out onto the bridge, jumped a barrier, and plunged 10 metres into the shallows.
Three men died on impact.
A fourth man was pulled alive from the water by construction workers who jumped in to free him.
But the bridge wasn’t done taking lives.
On Dec. 6, 1957, Albert Bearchell, a steelworker fell 30 metres while working on the bridge and was killed on impact.
His death led to an inquest and calls for safety nets to be installed.
Workmen’s Compensation Board inspector Walter Miller stated that safety nets were not practical, nor were safety lines.
The jury in the inquest deemed Bearchell’s death accidental.
As the clocks turned to1958, work continued, and it seemed the spectre of death had finally lifted. For six weeks in April and May, no work was done on the bridge as a shipment of steel was delayed.
Once it arrived, everything got back on schedule.
The bridge was expected to open by the end of 1958 if all went according to plan.
But the deadliest day of the Second Narrows Bridge was fast approaching.
Tuesday, June 17, 1958, was a beautiful spring day.
The weather was clear and warm, with a slight wind coming off the Georgia Strait that was expected to increase by the afternoon.
Bridge workers arrived early in the morning.
On the beaches near the bridge, people waded in the water and children played in the sand.
Out on the ocean, great freighters sailed into Vancouver Harbour with goods that would be shipped across the continent, while fishing boats, both large and small, went out to sea to get that day’s catch.
By the afternoon, the wind was gusting, but the day remained beautiful.
Meanwhile, dozens of workers watched a crane connect two cords of the unfinished bridge arch together.
They could see the crane operator struggling to keep everything steady in the wind.
Suddenly, at 3:40 p.m., the sound of a loud snap filled the air.
Then the earth rumbled.
For about 50 men, the ground they stood on gave way and they plummeted 64 metres or about 20 stories high into the water.
Steel and concrete followed.
As soon as they heard the snapping, several others ran and jumped to a more solid section of the bridge just in time.
It saved their lives.
Those that survived falling into the water were quickly swept away by the current, while others were trapped in the wreckage and drowned.
The few that survived being swept by the current sank under the waves weighted down by their heavy tool belts.
The one unable to remove the belts in time eventually floated down river lifelessly to join other unfortunate souls.
Ben Hallman was driving nearby when he heard the loud sound of metal grinding on metal.
He looked over to the bridge construction site and saw the Second Narrows Bridge centre section fall into the water, followed quickly by a second bridge section.
The crane tottered high in the air as the crane operator hung on for dear life.
Jack Drinkle, a toll operator on the North Shore saw the bridge fall in front of him and said,
“We were collecting tolls, then there came two cracks and a sound like thunder. Both sections fell together and rode slowly down.”
Edward Herring was hauling gravel when he heard a crack of steel and assumed someone was using dynamite.
He looked over, and he saw 12 men leaping from the collapsing bridge as it vanished into a cloud of smoke.
On the bridge, steelworker Bill Stroud heard a loud noise and felt the surface below him move. He knew immediately what was going on and, in the seconds, he had to react, he looked for something to jump to but before he could he was in the water.
Quote “I hung on to the rigging floating in the water. There were about five of us. There was so much rigging it held up the boat that finally pulled me out. I guess I am the luckiest of the bunch.”
Edwin Leitch, who was at his mother’s house on the south side of Burrard Inlet said,
“The new Second Narrows Bridge collapsed in a great splash of water and a roar as loud as thunder. There came a frightening roar. It sounded like a continuous peal of thunder. It lasted at least 15 seconds. I ran out on the front verandah and saw the fifth section of the bridge, nearest our shore, falling into the water, its temporary wooden supports crumbling beneath. A crane which had been sitting near the end of the section also tumbled.”
Denis Gladstone was angry as he drove away from the bridge. He had just been let go by the bridge construction company and he was on his way to the Unemployment Insurance Commission to collect $30 he said the company still owed him.
Ten minutes after he left, he watched the entire thing fall into the water.
Gladstone called it the luckiest day he ever had.
As soon as the great bridge fell into the water like a wounded beast, a flotilla of ships sailed directly towards the crash site.
The sounds of dying and injured men could be heard on both sides of the river as the tugs, rowboats, RCMP patrol boats and more hurried across the water.
In the sky, helicopters hovered as the pilots radioed down to guide water crafts to those needing help.
Jim English, a steelworker, made it to shore, his face covered in blood.
His right arm hung useless and limp at his side.
No ambulance had arrived at the scene, so he turned and began to walk to the hospital.
Nearby people administered first aid to the injured and unconscious men laying on the ground.
About 14 professional and amateur skin divers rushed to the collapse when they heard news of the disaster.
Amid the swirling wreckage, they dove into the water and used welding torches to extricate any bodies trapped underneath.
One skindiver, Jock McLean, said,
“We recovered two bodies from 30 feet of water under the wreckage. The tide was holding them against the steelwork.”
Each of these divers were tethered to boats to prevent them from being swept away in the current.
Two kilometres downriver, six bodies were picked up by two tugboats from the L&K Lumber Company.
Another tugboat nearby picked up the bodies of five others.
The number of victims rose by the second.
But some were lucky, as seen when Bert Carson used his speed boat to pull six alive men from the water and took them to shore to get medical help.
He said,
“There were no screams, everybody seemed to be in a state of shock when I got there. Everybody who could help when I picked them up did so and men on shore kept directing me to where more bodies appeared.”
It seemed with each passing minute; the disaster claimed more lives.
Ernest Duggan saw the bridge collapse and knew his son Kevin was on it.
He raced to the scene and asked dozens of people if they had seen him.
No one had.
A few minutes later, he found him.
It wasn’t a happy reunion as he watched Kevin floating in the water, claimed by the Second Narrows disaster.
In the chaos heroes were born.
John Wulf, a painter foreman, was on a part of the bridge that was still standing when he saw a man struggling in the water.
He grabbed a 30-metre-long rope hanging nearby and slid down even as it tore the palms of his hands to shreds.
Unable to stand the pain, he let go and fell the final five metres to the water surface where.
He grabbed the struggling man and swam with him to shore, saving his life.
Once rescued, those injured were taken to the hospital, while crews stayed behind to begin the difficult task of recovering bodies from the twisted metal.
By the end of the day, 18 men were presumed dead but only 15 bodies were recovered.
It was the second-deadliest bridge disaster in British Columbia’s history.
If you’re wondering, the deadliest was the 1896 Point Ellice bridge collapse that killed 55 people in a street car.
But the Second Narrows Bridge was not done claiming lives.
One week after the disaster, Keith Mott was assisting another diver in cutting a piece of steel when he was swept down the river.
A barge threw a ring to him, but he was unable to grab it before he disappeared underwater.
He was never seen again and on Oct. 23, 1958, he was officially presumed dead.
On June 25, 1958, a coroner’s jury ruled that 15 of the 18 men killed in the bridge collapse died because of injuries or drowning but claimed that the bridge was not overloaded.
Just over a week later on July 9, Chief Justice Sherwood Lett of the British Columbia Supreme Court opened a Royal Commission investigation.
The same day that the Royal Commission began hearing testimonies, a fund for the widows and children of the men lost in the disaster reached $35,100.
That is nearly $400,000 in 2024 funds.
On July 24, Chief Justice Lett adjourned the Royal Commission until Sept. 30 so that bridge engineers from the United States and Britain could assess and assist in the investigation.
One week later, work began on dismantling the two collapsed sections of the bridge so that they could be examined.
When the Royal Commissioned reconvened, an independent engineer named A.B. Sanderson shared that four steel girders that were laid across pilings to support the span on temporary bridge legs had failed.
This caused the first span to collapse, and then a chain reaction brought down the second span.
Alexander Hrennikoff, a professor of engineering at the University of British Columbia, testified that the vertical centre supports did not have the necessary buckling strength.
It was of the opinion of Hrennikoff that since the company had used similarly designed supports on other bridges they had built without incident, they believed that there would not be a problem this time.
He said,
“The successful outcome of those erections might have been construed as the vindication of the method of design.”
He added that he was surprised construction had reached so far before the collapse happened.
Six months after the disaster, work began once again to complete the Second Narrows Bridge.
It seemed that finally, the bridge had quenched its bloodthirst.
The final bit of work put down 6,000 tons of reinforced concrete and blacktop over the roadway bridge.
That concrete was poured on the bridge span using a self-propelled cart on a one-way track.
Upon completion, 16,000 tons of steel, equal to 20 per cent of British Columbia’s annual consumption of steel was used.
The framework used an estimated 23,000 square metres of wood.
When the north and south ends of the bridge were joined together, the measurements had been so exact that the two pieces were within 30 millimetres of each other.
On Aug. 25, 1960, the $23 million bridge was opened to the public in a somber ceremony.
On hand was Premier W.A.C. Bennett, various government officials, engineers and civic dignitaries.
William Wright, who was injured in the collapse, cut a blue ribbon to signify the bridge was open and then Premier Bennett drove over it to officially open it.
He told the gathered crowd of 1,000 people.
“This is a happy day for us all.”
It wasn’t a true statement.
There were many people who were not happy at all.
One of them was Mrs. John A. Wright, no relation to William Wright.
She stood in the summer sun as a band played Nearer, My God, to Thee.
She then unveiled a plaque listing the names of all the men who had been killed in construction of the bridge,
As tears stained her face, she honoured the men lost… including.
The last name on the plaque…. her husband.
Despite how difficult it was being at the site, she said she had to be there and said.
“I thought it over, then I decided I would, for the men and for no other reason.”
For years, the Second Narrow Bridge carried an unofficial moniker.
Death Span.
B June 17, 1994, the bridge was renamed the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing to honour the men who died during its construction.
In 1972, Stompin’ Tom Connors wrote a musical tribute to the workers who died called The Bridge Came Tumbling Down.
It appeared on his 1972 album My Stompin’ Grounds, and various other compilations.
Jimmy Dean wrote Steel Men, a ballad to honour the men, while Gary Geddes 2007 book of poetry Falsework, is based on the collapse of the bridge.
So, the next time you are in Vancouver and are one of the 120,000 drivers going across the 1.2-kilometre-long bridge, remember the men who died to build it and help complete the Trans-Canada Highway.
