CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: The Quebec Bridge and Its Hard Lessons

Paragraph A

For much of the nineteenth century, anyone wishing to cross the St. Lawrence River at Quebec City had to rely on ferries in summer and, in some winters, on a risky route over the ice. A fixed rail crossing was long seen as essential to the city’s growth, but the obstacles were enormous: the river there is wide and deep, with powerful tides and heavy ice in the spring. Engineers settled on a cantilever design, in which massive steel arms reach out from towers on each shore and support a central span between them. Because no piers were needed in the middle of the channel, ships and drifting ice could pass freely. When it was finally completed, the bridge’s main span measured about 549 metres, which is still the longest of any cantilever bridge in the world.

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Construction began in the early 1900s under the direction of a respected American consulting engineer who, because of his age and poor health, supervised the work largely from his office in New York. To reduce the cost of building foundations in deep water, the main span was made longer than in the original plan, yet the added weight of the steel was never properly recalculated. By late August 1907, an inspector on site had reported that several steel members were bending out of shape. On August 29, before these warnings could be acted upon, the southern half of the structure collapsed into the river, killing 75 men. Among them were dozens of Mohawk ironworkers from Kahnawake, near Montreal. A royal commission later concluded that errors in the design calculations, along with weak oversight, were to blame.

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Work started again with a new design, overseen by a board of engineers appointed by the federal government. This time the bridge was built with far heavier and stronger steel members, and the work was checked more carefully at every stage. Tragedy struck again in September 1916, when the central span, which had been floated into position on barges, was being lifted into place. A piece of the lifting equipment failed, and the span dropped into the river, killing 13 workers. A replacement span was raised successfully the following year, and the first trains crossed in 1917. A roadway was added later, and today the bridge carries trains, cars and pedestrians. It has also been recognized as a National Historic Site of Canada.

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The disasters left a lasting mark on the engineering profession in Canada. In the 1920s, a ceremony was created in which graduating engineers receive an iron ring, worn on the little finger of the working hand, as a reminder of their duty to the public. A popular story claims that the first rings were made from steel taken from the fallen bridge, but historians have found no evidence to support it. The losses were also felt deeply in Kahnawake. After 1907, the community decided that its ironworkers should no longer all work together on a single project, so that one accident could never again take so many of its men. Mohawk ironworkers went on to help build bridges and skyscrapers across North America.