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Falsework (Goose Lane $19.95)
Three events in British Columbia drew world attention during the 1950s. Englishman Roger Bannister and Australian John Landy eclipsed the four-minute-mile barrier at Empire Stadium during the Miracle Mile (on August 7, 1954); north of Campbell River, engineers generated the largest non-nuclear peacetime explosion in human history at Ripple Rock (on April 5, 1958); and eighteen steel workers and one rescue diver were killed when the Second Narrows Bridge collapsed during its construction (on June 17, 1958).
In 1958, having just graduated from King Edward High School, Gary Geddes was working on the waterfront at BC Sugar Refinery, loading boxcars with 100-pound sacks of sugar, so the news of the bridge collapse did not take long to reach him.
"What I did not know at the time,"; he says, "was that my father had been called out as a former navy diver to stand by in the search for bodies in the wreckage. I've carried for a long time the image of him dangling from his umbilical cord of oxygen in that cauldron of swirling water and twisted metal.";
Geddes has imagined the voices of those most directly affected by the accident for an unusual collection of poetry, prose and archival photos called Falsework (Goose Lane $19.95). The title is an engineering term that refers to the temporary supports that are required for a cantilevered bridge under construction.
"In this case,"; he says, "a mistake was made and the horizontal I-beams were inadequate to support the weight. It was a simple mathematical error that should have been picked up by both the contractor, Dominion Bridge, and the consulting engineers, Swan Wooster and Associates.";
The Second Narrows Bridge was renamed the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge in 1994 to commemorate the tragedy. To this day many British Columbians are haunted by the event. This summer, when Geddes read from Falsework at the Denman Island Writers Festival, a woman in the audience recalled working as a telephone operator in 1958-and every conversation she overhead on that fateful day mentioned the bridge failure.
978-0-86492-498-8
[BCBW 2007] "history"
In 1958, having just graduated from King Edward High School, Gary Geddes was working on the waterfront at BC Sugar Refinery, loading boxcars with 100-pound sacks of sugar, so the news of the bridge collapse did not take long to reach him.
"What I did not know at the time,"; he says, "was that my father had been called out as a former navy diver to stand by in the search for bodies in the wreckage. I've carried for a long time the image of him dangling from his umbilical cord of oxygen in that cauldron of swirling water and twisted metal.";
Geddes has imagined the voices of those most directly affected by the accident for an unusual collection of poetry, prose and archival photos called Falsework (Goose Lane $19.95). The title is an engineering term that refers to the temporary supports that are required for a cantilevered bridge under construction.
"In this case,"; he says, "a mistake was made and the horizontal I-beams were inadequate to support the weight. It was a simple mathematical error that should have been picked up by both the contractor, Dominion Bridge, and the consulting engineers, Swan Wooster and Associates.";
The Second Narrows Bridge was renamed the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge in 1994 to commemorate the tragedy. To this day many British Columbians are haunted by the event. This summer, when Geddes read from Falsework at the Denman Island Writers Festival, a woman in the audience recalled working as a telephone operator in 1958-and every conversation she overhead on that fateful day mentioned the bridge failure.
978-0-86492-498-8
[BCBW 2007] "history"
Submitted on November 22, 2007 in By David.
