The Quebec Bridge Disaster of 1977 | Episode 34

We always say the only upside from a disaster is the legacy of safety from the lessons learned, But not today. I don't want to spoil the surprise here, but I think you'll find today's story most riveting. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, there will be your typical mutilations and manglings and scissorings, and you can try to imagine being repeatedly cut in half, but in three dimensions, and will play a game of would you rather fall one hundred and fifty feet onto rocks or find yourself pressed into mud and suffocated. This is not the show you play around kids while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoe the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Bonjeur mon amie. Today's story takes us to the eastern Canadian province of Quebec La Belle Provence. You probably didn't know. The French were the first to really explore North America, and Quebec is where they set up shop. Quebec City itself is one of the oldest cities in North America. It's almost four hundred and fifteen years old, and it really feels it like a piece of Europe. But on this side of the pond, it's quite unlike any other city in North America. Historic buildings lining narrow, winding cobblestone streets, protected by fortified walls, and sitting dramatically atop a cliff overlooking the Saint Lawrence River. Unesco gives it their heartiest chef's kiss from n in years, the regional Mohawks called it camea Tarrano wanna, until a man named Jacques Cartier rolled up in fifteen thirty five. Cartier was the first European to sneeze and paddle his way inland up the continent. He floated up on August tenth, or Saint Lawrence's feast day, and he named it after that. It's kind of like a burglar breaking into your home. And telling you your new name is Monday. Now you know, we have a thing for the wacky fates of saints on this show. And Saint Lawrence was one of seven deacons who were in charge of giving help to the poor and needy in old timey Rome, way back in the second century, the year two fifty eight. The head boss at the time was Pope Sixtus the Second. For a hot minute before he was escorted away for head removal, Lawrence was shocked. He was all, father, where are you going without your deacon? And Pope Sixtus answered, I'm not leaving you, my son. In three days, you will follow me, and Lawrence was all wal fast forward a little bit, and Lawrence found himself being slow roasted on a kind of caged iron grill, and halfway through he burned his executioners by saying, I'm well done on this side, turn me over, and the crowd was all, oh snap. There's nothing written about how they got his massive testicles into this medieval Panini press, but here we are, and the Saint Lawrence River celebrates those testicles. No one can know how many rivers there are on earth. They're bourne, they dry up, they split, they merge, do brooks and streams even count Let's just say there's thousands and thousands and thousands for sure. People in the know say that the Earth has about one hundred and seventy major rivers and about fourteen hundred quote notable ones. So how does Lawrence's namesake stack up? By flow? The Saint Lawrence River is the sixteenth biggest river on Earth. It discharges fourteen hundred Dodge caravans worth of water every second, depending on how you measure it. It's as much as three thousand kilometers or almost two thousand miles long. Some people call it the Saint Lawrence Seaway. See it runs all the way from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic. Think of it like swimming from New York to Miami. And it's not just that parts of this thing are as wide as the Grand Canyon. Now. Quebec City could sat anywhere along the waterway, but they chose a spot where it narrowed to a much more manageable three point two kilometers or one point nine miles across. Having the high ground like that meant that anything coming down the river would have to funnel in and let hundreds of French cannonballs rain down on them. The river would have been difficult enough to cross even without the welcome party. You could boat across, but with a flow around fifteen kilometers or ten miles per hour, it's hard not to land downstream, and in the winter it could freeze. But crossing it belonged inside a ven diagram, wedged between dangerous, stupid, and no thank you. As time went on and technology advanced overreall, what about a bridge? But engineers had been deflecting that question since eighteen fifty two. Like we said, the river was almost two miles across, and to make things worse, it could reach fifty eight meters or one hundred and ninety feet deep, and that the tides changed by five meters or sixteen and a half feet in a day. But wait, there's more. During the winter, ice flows regularly piled up as much as fifty feet high, turning it into a kind of hallacious sleigh ride full of praying and nervous farts. All this meant Quebec City was getting left behind Montreal as Canada's leading eastern trading port. Around eighteen eighty seven, a group of businessmen decided it was vital to increase business traffic in the area, and they took on the challenge. Quebec's parliament got on board and yadi, YadA, YadA, they formed the Quebec Bridge and Railway Company. Edward Horr was hired as chief engineer, despite never having worked on a bridge this large before, but in fairness, no one had to make up for his lack of experience. Theodore Cooper was brought on as a consultant. Yes that Theodore Cooper, the July pin up model from the famous American Bridge Engineers of America calendar. At the time, he was now in his sixties and based in New York City and not in the best of health, but he was an engineering superstar. He had that electric bridge based swagger that made everyone fall in line like that scene from Dirty Dancing. A cantilever bridge was proposed to bridge the harsh Icy waters. This was going to be the largest cantilever span ever attempted. The initial design for the bridge was produced by a company man named Peter Slapka, and it was green lit by Cooper. Worth it to point out that Slapka had to guestimate the weight of the finished piece to design it in the first place, but at least it was a start. They would span the lower Saint Lawrence River between Saint Croix and le'v just a few miles below the city. Cooper would rely on Horror and a young engineer named Norman McClure to be his eyes and ears on the scene. He wasn't intending to be around that much, like we said, he was sick and living in New York City at the time. This whole project was massively important to the economic interests of the region. With the addition of a railway now also crossing the bridge, the finished product would help connect the Maritimes to the Prairies. The wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves. You probably want to know what the hell it can't to leave for bridges. Picture a style of bridge that's anchored and supported, but only at one end. The anchor and the pier hold on to all the weight that extends horizontally into space. It's kind of like a cirqu desolea trick. You pair that up with a reversed out twin on the other side, and there you have it. What could go wrong? And I'm not bad mouth and candilver bridges. They're strong and reliable, but They are heavy, and the heavier your bridge, the more complicated the math needs to be to make it work. They're good for bridging deep gorges or places that flood, basically anywhere that wants to sweep the leg of a regular, old pillared style bridge. Once Cooper got his hands on the design, his first move was to change everything. He doodled over it and extended the bridge span from sixteen hundred to eighteen hundred feet. The idea was the main pier supporting the bridge were supposed to rise about one hundred and fifty feet above the water, but he wanted to drag them on land. For one, it's an absolute pain in the ass to construct anything offshore, and assuming that you weren't killed by ice, floes or flood waters while building them. Now they have to sit there and compete with the conditions. More cynically, changing the plans shaved an entire year off the project, which means boom, money back in your pocket. Well, somebody's pocket, not the Phoenix Bridge companies. They got the contract for the construction and they came into this whole deal at Cooper's request, and they were doing the whole evil fly hand rubbing thing with dollar signs or eyes, but instead money was a constant issue. When Cooper picked them, he said it was because their plan was the best and the cheapest, which obviously sounds scary on a disaster podcast, but but sounds like a good deal. The taxpayers people had wanted this bridge for decades, but like we said, the money was never there for it, privately or from the government. Every prime minister for decades had it on their to do list of campaign promises. But it finally fell to Wilford Laurier, seventh Prime Minister of Canada, and he got to hold up the big check and use the big scissors and all. The thing is, though, infrastructure funding does not have bottomless pockets to draw from. And here's where things get dicey. The longer span meant more material costs, which meant less money for things like design and testing. Phoenix complained about it, so Cooper swooped in and scribbly scratched some new math and specifications that would allow them to continue on, assuring them that the weight was not going to be a problem. Because of those money problems, construction would be put on hold for years at a time. The first shovel didn't hit the dirt until October second, nineteen hundred. That's twenty years into this. They wouldn't even start on some parts of the superstructure until nineteen oh five, and every new delay added pressure to try to figure out new ways to cut the time frame and budget. In fact, if the Phoenix Company didn't finish by the end of nineteen oh eight, they had to pay a five thousand dollars penalty for every month until they did. They confirmed that the only way that they were going to keep to time and budget was to scrap plans to double check the math on Cooper's revised specs. This is a pretty bold line in the sand and it would have panicked most people, but Cooper didn't budge. He signed off anyway. When an engineer from the Canadian government questioned how much stress the bridge would need to support, Cooper put him on blast. He lost it. He yelled that he would never suffer in subordination, and people gave him the ok okay hands. It was a bit like Trump and Beyonce had a baby who grew up to be a spoiled engineer. He could do this to anyone who questioned him. Site inspectors told him his bridge was too heavy, and they got an ear full too, And this went on for years. Raw red girders rose one hundred and fifty feet above the water. As the bridge began to take shape, metal workers and riveters dressed in tweed vests and striped shirts swarmed over the structure. They looked more like full timey bartenders than construction workers. These guys had those curly brimmed derby hats, not helmets. Osha wasn't a thing yet. By June of nineteen oh seven, the south anchor arm, the tower, and two panels of the south cantilever arm were ready. Six sections of the anchor arm were in place, and the people started doing kind of weird things with their eyebrows. They started to notice there was a little boeing here, maybe a little buckling there. Workers and supervisors noticed a bend in the beams and a deformation in the cables. For whatever reason, these elements were moving and stretching out of place. When they would look down the line of pre drilled holes for the cables, they didn't line up anymore, and they were getting worse. Most engineers start to get snickey if their alignments are off by a few millimeters, it means something was fabricated wrong, or the plan was wrong. Questions and fingers were pointing everywhere. Slapka was responsible receiving the materials in good order, but Slapka never actually saw them. He found himself in one of those he Said, She said scenarios where he said the pieces must have been delivered deformed, but the fabricator said they'd been perfectly aligned when they left the wear regardless, he was hundreds of miles away in Phoenixville, and he signed off of them as is. Like we said, most modern engineers will freak out if their work moves by more than a few millimeters, and these were off by fifty seven millimeters. That's more than two inches. But here's the thing. Cooper's inability to actually be on site created some confusion about leadership. There wasn't a clear chain of command. He had final say and everything needed to be routed through him. No one on the actual work site was qualified to oversee this type of worker to make a decision. No one knew exactly what was happening. But when McClure clued in, he called for a halt to construction. He set off from Phoenixville to New York City to advise Cooper in person. By this point, even the workers were audibly disinterested in continuing with the work. Some just stopped showing up. There was even a small strike about it. But what do we always say about jobs, That's increasingly true the further back you go in time. You can have your job and you can have your survival instinct, but you cannot keep both in equal measure. Sufficiently disillusioned by mc clure's story, Cooper flipped out. He sent a telegraph to say they should halt construction immediately and await further instruction no more weight on the bridge. His telegraph arrived in Phoenixville around three p m. And was promptly disregarded ed Horr put everyone back to work as soon as mc clure left. Anyway. Two days later, when mc clure returned, he found out the telegraph had never been forwarded to Quebec and everyone was still working, and he flipped out. Horror made some crazy argument about the effect not working would have on the morale, and mc clure called a meeting to discuss the issue, and thirty minutes later, high above the Saint Lawrence River, a worker named Alexander Beauvet was driving rivets into the southern span. The completed section was a diamond shaped lace work of steel. One arm was thrust almost half way across the river, while the other jutted to a base on the south shore. Beauvet had been in charge of a riveting gang. He reported that two rivets had broken off near a splice and the ribs were bending, but his rivet boss was all, thank you, Nancy Drew and told him not to worry about it. It was near the end of the day, only minutes away from the evening whistle, when he noticed another cheered rivet, and this was one that he'd driven himself earlier in the day. He called out to his foreman, but before he got a response, the outer arm of the diamond, pointing over the river shuddered. The sound of riveting was replaced with the sound of screaming metal twisting, and a second later the bridge played tore free from the stone pier and dropped out from beneath them into the Saint Lawrence. If you can picture the framework of a bridge. Bovet had been driving rivets inside the framework when it began to fall. He immediately bare hugged this piece and prayed as tons of metal flew all around him, crushing and slicing everything in sight. The piece he'd been working on fell, but landed upright, sparing his life. He had only a broken foot and a nose to show for it. But his fellow riveters were gone. Even his rivet boss was gone. One of the critical compression members had buckled. And no, we're not turning this into an engineer podcast. You might not understand all the technical terms, and you don't have to. The gist of it is a supporting element failed, which meant the weight it used to support immediately became the burden of other elements which also buckled and failed, and so on and so on, until the only thing holding up the southern arm was willpower. At the same time, the inner anchor arm leading back to the shore dropped on the rocks in a pile of twisted metal. And here's where we say, would you rather fall one hundred and fifty feet directly onto rocks or find yourself compressed into the mud to suffocate under the weight of metal work. Fifteen seconds was all it took the south anchor arm, the cantilever arm, and the partially completed suspended span dropped and vanished in a tremendous burst of spray. The sound was so thunderous and violent, people as far as six miles or ten kilometers away came outside, thinking there must have been an earthquake. Some workers ran and panicked. One man escaped by a single girder length as the deck collapsed. Beneath the Delphi Lachaness sat terrified on top of the structure when the bridge originally jerked and threw men all around him. Ingwell, Hall fell into the icy water and was thankful to find he was only missing two fingers. He said, I could feel it start to go down, and it was going down fast. You got tears in your eyes, and you could hardly realize anything beside you. My partner was just about seven or eight feet from me, and I never saw him again. They were the lucky ones. Eighty five other men dropped at least one hundred and fifty feet, pulled haplessly against their will. Some of the dead had been crushed as the steel twisted around them. Others were pulled beneath the water and drowned. Most were badly mutilated, delimbed, or bisected by the mangling scissoring action of the collapsing metal. For those who are afraid of dying in a falling elevator and being cut in half, it's like that, but in three dimensions. Think of it like Edwards scissorhands closing a fist. Many who survived the plunge into the freezing water were then killed because those curly brimmed derby hats did not do much to stop the hundreds of pounds of tools and debris falling after them. Those who weren't killed by the fall or the landing found themselves pinned and clinging to the metalwork. Some were plucked out of the river by nearby boats within minutes in the crash, while others would become hypothermic and drowned before anyone could reach them. A train engineer plunged with his locomotive into the river, but he was dragged out alive by a rescue boat. About twelve men were found trapped in the mangled debris, which had landed on dry land close to shore. They were cold and in shock, but they were alive. Rescuers became frantic when they realized they didn't have the kind of equipment they needed to extract the men, and within the hour, all twelve would drown as the tide rose around them. Because of the complexity of the metal structure falling, some survived purely by chance, like in an old Buster Keaton movie where the house falls down all around him, but he glides effortlessly through a window frame. Those who had been on the bridge only minutes before or looked back in horror. Of the eighty six men on the bridge, seventy five died. Thirty three of them were local Kanawake Mohawk ironworkers Kanawauke skywalkers, as they were known to the rest of the world. They worked on famous projects like Montreal's Placida Marie, the Empire State Building in New York, the United Nation buildings, and skyscrapers in Detroit and Boston. So how do people who traditionally survive mostly from trade and travel become masters of industry. Well back in the eighteen fifties, when Montreal was building bridges, the Kanawake were fascinated by the scale of construction, and they fearlessly climbed the support beams to take a look for themselves. They weren't even scolded. Managers realized these guys were as agile as mountain goes, and they were fearlessly immune to the heights and the noise of riveting, which which usually made newbies dizzy and sick. They were so specialized and naturally talented they were even brought in to help remove victims from the World Trade Center towers after nine to eleven. They were the best of the best, and when the bridge fell they lost thirty three of their own. Only a handful survived in an instant. Twenty two families lost their bread winners, twenty five women became widows, and fifty three children were fatherless. No other community was hit as hard, and with the loss of daylight, the efforts to save survivors fizzled. The Quebec Bridge was going to be one of the engineering wonders of the world, forty million pounds of structural steel reaching towards the city, and now they say it lay like wet spaghetti, splashed across the ground and into the river. Only eleven of the workers on the span were recovered alive. When the sun rose, the only metal visible above the waterline was tangled in a surreal fashion men who had worked on it didn't recognize it at all. Same for bodies. Corpses were found downstream for days. Limbs either sank or floated further on, becoming Ontario's problem. Other bodies were found trapped or pinned by debris that made removal incredibly difficult. An illustration on the cover of a local paper showed a man pinned between two massive columns of steel, with a third, smaller rail breaking through his chest like a butterfly pinned to a board with a book put on top just to be sure it doesn't get away, and removal often meant dismembering bodies with crowbars to make them more manageable. It was Canada's worst bridge disaster, and it raises the question if you were to find yourself needing to fall into water from a height, would you know what to do? So you're one hundred or more feet above the water and you're hella, clumsy people cliff dog all the time, shouldn't you be able to survive? Well, let's explore first. It doesn't matter whether you fall from ten thousand feet or eighteen hundred feet. You are now at terminal velocity that's as much as one hundred and twenty seven miles or two hundred and four kilometers an hour. You're heading straight down at fifty meters per second. And just so it said, there are no good records of someone falling at terminal velocity into water and surviving. So really, we're just arming you with the best practices to give you the best fighting chance of being the first And who better to learn from than the US Navy. Here is what they will teach you about abandoning ship. There are a lot of factors involved. The orientation of your body as it enters the water, the area of impact, the velocity during impact, the time it takes to reach zero velocity once in the water, the mass of your body, your fitness level, the condition of the water, the depth of the water, and on and on and on. So the first step, keep your clothing on, including your shoes. You're probably gonna want a life jacket, but if you wear it on the way down, it could easily break your neck or dislocate your shoulders. It's better to throw it in first and hope that you get to reunite. First step is a doozy and go feed first, cross your legs at the ankles and keep your feet tightly together like straight toes, pointed down, and fix your eyes straight on the horizon. If you look down, you're gonna start to fall forward, and if you look up, you're gonna fall on your back. Get the wrong way and you're likely gonna break most of the bones in your legs and going head first, that's a one way ticket. Proper positioning when entering the water is critical, and not that you won't already be doing this anyways, but clench your butt. If you've ever had water up your nose, you really do not want it in your anus. Although if you go in wrong and you dislocate both your legs in the attempt, this new sea water enema will be the least of your concerns. With your left arm, hold it close to your side with the left hand covering your crotch. Your right hand should be placed on your chin with the fingers covering your mouth, and hold your nose tightly or water will be forced into your sinuses and down your throat. This could easily rupture your sinuses and flood your lungs. Here's something else you won't like. The water will be cold, and your automatic reaction once you enter is going to be to suck in a big gulp of air. You need to calm that reflex and wait till you're back on the surface for obvious reasons, and you will go deep, so at some point you're gonna need to start scissor kicking your legs to slow your descent. There are stories of people who survived falls into water like this but became speared into the mud and drowned. If you have the peace of mind, follow bubbles to get back to the surface. I have a very good story about this, but it's too long for right now. When you reach the surface, if you notice that it's on fire at the time, you can stir the surface from beneath like Aquaman to clear a space so you can pop up and catch a breath. You're gonna want to swim underwater until you're clear of all the burning before you go into a survival float. And unless it is an absolute emergency in open seas, you need to know that any dive from any height is dangerous. A Royal commission was set up to investigate the disaster. In fact, their two hundred page report was so thorough that it became the blueprint that changed the standards of engineering across North America, and the report concluded it was the design, not the materials. The collapse resulted from the buckling of one or more of the critical compression members that led to the failure of the defectively designed lower cables in the anchor arm close to the backbone of the bridge. The compression cord members for the Quebec bridge consisted of four multi layered ribs held together by diagonal latticing to make them act as a single unit. During later testing, the lattice system failed explosively due to the shearing of the rivets. The report lay the blame like wreaths around the necks of Peter Slapka and the designer Theodore Cooper. The off site celebrity consulting engineer. Slapka made the original design on assumptions about the deadload and weight for the bridge. Cooper then popped in and made things weired by increasing the bridge's size and weight, and no one double checked the math because of time and money. It has been said that in every conflict between safety and economy, economy always wins. The report also blamed the company for not hiring more experienced engineers and talked about condemning the bridge, even though there wasn't that much left a condemn The seventy five who died made this the worst disaster in the history of bridge building. So what did we learned? If more importance had been placed on the basic math and science of the engineering, the project would have been condemned from day one. Steel was still relatively new to bridge design and not much was known about how the lattice would behave at scale. Cooper himself had written ground breaking papers about the use of steel in construction, and he was still wrong. Pair that with the fact that no one was going to question his judgment and the disaster was inevitable. And then there's this. Back in eighteen ninety, the Fourth Bridge in Scotland was completed. Cooper kind of hated it. He called it the clumsiest structure ever designed by a man. The span of the Fourth Bridge was five hundred and twenty one meters. That was long longer than the four hundred and eighty eight that was initially proposed for the Quebec Bridge. So when Cooper got his hands on it and resketched and scribbled, he expended his span to five hundred and forty nine meters, giving it the title of the longest cantilever bridge in the world. It was also largely assumed that Cooper's redesign was motivated by ego and desired to have his name on something massive. He was, after all, sixty, he was in poor health, and he wanted his swan song. The idea that he had been blinded by his legacy and ignored weight miscalculations was not lost on people. And finally, and most damning was the fact that he took total responsibility a job from five hundred miles or eight hundred kilometers away, and that he hired a company to supervise that was even further away, and not one of them ever visited the site. In the commission comments, it was said that it was clear on that day that the greatest bridge in the world was being built without a single man within reach who, by experience, knowledge and ability, was competent to deal with the crisis. The day, a Boost family lost four brothers, an uncle, a cousin, and a brother in law, leaving twenty two children behind. It was said that their intense grief was most touching and brought tears to the eyes of onlookers even more than if it had been voiced. The poor thing simply sat quietly in the office, hardly uttering a word, but the mere look on their faces was enough to cause the strongest ones to lower their voices to whispers. Fifteen days wages were paid to the families of the dead and the injured survivors, with one bizarre complication. A question arose in one case in which a man seemed to have committed bigamy, and uncertainty arose as to who was the proper recipient of his money. It was one of those two wives showed up at the funeral situations. Now, the timing couldn't be worse. And I'm really sorry if this seems insensitive, but the government really really wanted that rail link in place, and Quebec Bridge two point zero was on the table. From there. It took two u full years to remove most of the debris from Quebec Bridge one point zero. The spans remained at the bottom of the river, and except for the piers, nothing from the previous structure was usable. It became a kind of pilgrimage site for engineers to come and consider the vast destructive forces of human error in April of nineteen eleven, the Board of Engineers awarded the contract for Bridge two point zero to the Saint Lawrence Bridge Company of Montreal. The government granted special permission to acquire the metal they needed, see it was war time and steel was in high demand. This also meant that special passes were required to get past the armed soldiers because of fears of German sabotage. But other than that, it was second verse, same as the first. This design also called for a cantilever style bridge, but stronger and better. Construction started in nineteen thirteen and by nineteen sixteen the bridge was nearly completed. All they had to do was hoist a fifty one hundred ton center span into place, connected on both sides, and it was unzo. The date was September the eleventh, nineteen sixteen. The span was maneuvered in a position between the cantilever arms, where huge lifting hangars attached to the ends of the arms raised it with hydraulic lifts. The span was lifted two feet at a time in a repeat operation until it was in place between the two arms, and after four successful lifts on the north end and five lifts on the south end yeah the southwest corner of the span tore away and sagged. A witness explained there was a noise like the snapping of steel. The center span seemed to buckle in the middle and roll over, twisting the great steel girders. A few seconds later, the other ends slipped off their supports, and the entire section dropped and disappeared into the river, carrying thirteen men to their deaths. According to the papers, a cry of anguish went up from the onlookers as the span rushed to its watery bed. Women shrieked, men stood dumbfounded, while those directly interested in the building of the bridge could scarcely hold back the tears which weld in their eyes. It was as if they had lost a great friend. They had lived with this span, they had pride in their work, and on the day when their desire was to be achieved, fate intervened. The new investigation into this second collapse determined it was actually the casing supporting the span that failed. The Saint Lawrence Bridge Company took full responsibility and took immediate steps to replace the span. By this point, it's clear you'd think the workers would be too haunted to want to even continue, but they did, and on September the twentieth, the replacement span was lifted into place and attached to the cantilever arms, and just two months later it collapsed again. I'm joking. Two months later the bridge was opened to train, vehicle and foot traffic. The Prince of Wales, Edward the eighth, officially opened the Quebec Bridge August the twenty second, nineteen nineteen, and unveiled plaques in honor of the engineers who had designed and built it, most of them, at least. There was no mention of those who had died. Seventy eight years later, in nineteen ninety seven, the Historic Sites and Monument Board of Canada unveiled a new plaque that commemorated the remarkable engineering achievement and included a small blurb about those who had died. Twice after the disaster, Edward Horr went to work for the National Transcontinental Railway Commission. Pete Slapka remained chief designer for the Phoenix Company and Cooper. He lived in what they call lonely retirement for the rest of his days, but not that many days. Two days after the Prince of Wales officially dedicated the completed Quebec Bridge. He died too. This disaster gave rise to the tradition that graduate engineers from Canada wore a ring on their pinky finger as a reminder that the fundamental duty of an engineer is to always prevent failure. A popular story is that the rings were forged from iron and steel from the collapsed bridge. In twenty fifteen, the Quebec Bridge was included in a list of the ten most endangered Historic sites in Canada by the National Trust of Canada due to long overdue repair work see back. In nineteen ninety three, ownership passed from the government to the c and Rail Company, and according to their lease, they're not obligated to really maintain or do anything until the lease expires in twenty fifty three, and as a result, about sixty percent of the bridge is currently covered in corrosive rust. Whether corrosion will one day result in Quebec Bridge three point zero, we'll just have to wait and see. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, where you can fire us an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. Don't forget, we're also on TikTok now as Doomsday the podcast. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can buy me a coffee at buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday. But if you can spare the money and you had to choose, we ask you to consider making no donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy five different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot CAA. On the next episode, a lot of you have fears about flying. There's turbulence, engine failure, the shear, this is too heavy to stay in the air of it all. But we are going to tell you a story about a whole new way to die in the air that you didn't even know about. It's the Dallas Fort Worth microburst of nineteen eighty five. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for