The Quebec Bridge Disaster, 1907: The Bridge Could Not Be Saved. The Men Could.

On 29 August 1907, eighty-six men were on the Quebec Bridge. Eleven of them came back. The Royal Commission that investigated it wrote two findings, one after the other, on the same page. Finding (i): the fall of the bridge could not have been prevented by any action taken after 27 August. Finding (j): the loss of life might have been prevented by better judgment on the part of those in responsible charge. The bridge could not be saved. The men could. This episode reconstructs, hour by hour, how those two sentences ended up on the same page — from the specification written in 1887, through Appendix No. 5 on what the money did to the design, to the telegram nobody forwarded on the last morning. Every figure on screen carries the page it came from. — WHAT THE REPORT SAYS, AND WHERE • Lower-chord latticing near the main pier too weak for the stresses on it — p. 92 • Cooper learns the real dead load exceeds the assumed by about 10%, February 1906, and allows the work to proceed — p. 58 • The dead-load error itself, "fully ten per cent" — p. 109 • Stress in each lattice bar 21,600 lb/in², specified maximum 18,000 — pp. 92-93 • Cooper's telegram, 12.16 p.m.: "Add no more load to bridge till after due consideration of facts" — p. 91 • "Mr. McLure had promised to wire Mr. Cooper's decision to Mr. Kinloch immediately, but he did not do so." — p. 91 • "It was decided to postpone action until the morning… This decision was made almost at the minute that the bridge fell." — p. 91 • Eighty-six men on the work, eleven escaped with their lives — p. 96 • Findings (i) and (j) — p. 9 • The effect of financial limitations upon the design, Appendix No. 5 — pp. 35-38 — SOURCE Royal Commission on the Quebec Bridge Inquiry, Report, Sessional Paper No. 154. Ottawa, King's Printer, 20 February 1908. Three volumes. Public domain. Page numbers on screen are the PRINTED page numbers of the report. — PHOTOGRAPHS Every photograph in this video is a plate from the Royal Commission report (1908) or from the Quebec Bridge & Railway Company album (1907). Both were published before 1930 and are in the public domain. Ninety-four plates were cropped from the original scans for this episode. Dates shown under the photographs are the dates printed on the plates themselves, used only where we could verify them against the erection chronology. — MUSIC AND SOUND Score and sound effects composed for this episode. No library music. The collapse sound is built from what the report describes: the lattice failing by shear of the outside rivets (p. 136), then the arm entering the river. — A NOTE ON NUMBERS You will see 75, 76, 88 and 89 quoted for this disaster. 88 adds two different collapses together — this one, and 1916. The figure for 29 August 1907 is seventy-five. See the pinned comment for the two points where the report contradicts itself, and what we did about them. — TIMESTAMP 0:00 Eighty-six men 3:01 How the load was supposed to reach the ground 6:01 Appendix 5: the money 11:26 The number nobody recalculated 14:57 The last seventy-two hours 19:00 Seventy-five 20:25 What could have been prevented 22:17 The bridge, the code and the ring WATCH NEXT • Silver Bridge: One Hidden Crack Was All It Took —    • Silver Bridge: One Hidden Crack Was All It...   • The Tacoma Narrows Report Already Said It Wasn't Resonance. In 1941. —    • The Tacoma Narrows Report Already Said It ...   • Every episode, in order —    • Collapse Mechanism — Every Episode   #QuebecBridge #engineeringdisaster #documentary