cybergeisha

5 Dead in overpass collapse near Montreal (from KOMO News)

LAVAL, QUEBEC - Quebec provincial police said Sunday that at least five people were crushed to death in their cars after the collapse of an overpass near Montreal.

The cars were pulled out about 15 hours after Saturday’s dramatic lunchtime accident when a 65-foot stretch of three lanes of a viaduct collapsed, sending several other vehicles crashing onto Highway 19 below.

Three people were found in one car and two other bodies were recovered from the other car trapped by the falling concrete in Laval, police spokeswoman Isabelle Gendron said.

The vehicles were crushed so badly in the Saturday afternoon collapse that they barely reached the knees of one firefighter when lifted from under tons of concrete rubble Sunday.

Where are the answers? Apparently nobody knows why this happened. The overpass began to crumble, sending pieces of concrete down, and shortly afterward had a catastrophic structural failure. The local transit authority says the overpass was built in 1970, and the local government says it had passed structural inspection within the last year. So how does something like this just… happen? I was expecting to read about an earthquake, a bomb, a fire… but I haven’t found any answers to this baffling news story. The lack of explaination leaves a lot of questions about the construction practices in the area.

Even more alarming, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened - it’s the region’s second catastrophic failure of an overpass in the last six years. In 2000, an overpass (also in Laval, Quebec) collapsed without warning. In that collapse, a man was killed when his car was crushed underneath eight 70-ton beams.

I can’t comprehend it, and I can’t let something like this just be a news blurb. I know I don’t have any connection to Quebec or the state of that province’s transportation infrastructure. But I also know that things like this herald an underlying darker theme that often involves shady business practices, inferior workmanship to cut costs, and possibly corruption on a larger scale.

That kind of darkness is only ever dispelled by more people shedding light on the issue and taking a closer look. So, I suppose, I’m adding my personal desire for an answer to “What’s going on?” to what hopefully is increasing scrutiny into this. Maybe it’ll help. Maybe not.

But for some reason this just sort of got under my skin.