About a week ago I was driving towards Niagara Falls with my Aunt in the car. I was on a local hwy and was about to approach a new overpass which is in the process of still being built. As I drove towards it (you have to actually stop underneath it cause of how the temporary lights are set up) I was the first car to reach it. Suddenly I felt like I was in danger and I slowed the car down to a complete stop before going under it. My aunt asked me why I stopped there, and I told her I didnt feel comfortable with my car waiting for the light to change green underneath the overpass, eventhough I had done so on previous occasions.Once the light changed green I continued on through and made a right towards the Falls.
Well the next day I was listening to the news over the radio and I heard on it that an overpass actually collapsed in Quebec and killed 5 people. Afterwards I wondered if this was a premonition of that tragic event. Any thoughts?
Note: below is an article about the incident from online.
Quebec launches inquiry in fatal overpass collapse
BERTRAND MAROTTE AND JASON MAGDER
MONTREAL -- Robert Hotte was driving east in the centre lane of a highway overpass when his car suddenly -- sickeningly -- began lurching downward. He turned to his girlfriend seated next to him in the white Honda Civic, uttered her name, "Anne-Marie," and just had time to think that this was like an amusement-park ride before the stomach-churning drop into a dark tunnel.
Mr. Hotte and Anne-Marie Leblanc escaped with their lives and minor injuries in the freak collapse early Saturday afternoon of a massive 20-metre chunk of highway overpass in the sprawling bedroom community of Laval, north of Montreal.
Five people in two southbound vehicles passing underneath on Highway 19 were crushed to death by the tonnes of concrete and steel, their cars flattened like pancakes.
Another six people who were on the viaduct plunged to the highway below and were injured.
The six were in three vehicles and one motorcycle.
Quebec Premier Jean Charest and key ministers moved quickly to reassure Quebeckers that their public highway infrastructure is safe and not a crumbling testament to neglect and underfunding.
"I've always felt safe on [Quebec's] roads," Mr. Charest told reporters after a quick tour of the devastated site, the six-lane, 36-year-old bridge -- the de la Concorde Blvd. overpass -- that spans busy Highway 19.
Quebec Transport Minister Michel Despr?s announced the government will hold a public inquiry into the overpass tragedy, the second such incident in less than six years. It will be headed by former Parti Qu?b?cois premier Pierre-Marc Johnson.
In the summer of 2000, one man was killed and two others were injured when a highway overpass under construction, also in Laval, collapsed.
A coroner later concluded that the builder did not properly secure the concrete beams and raised questions about work practices in the province's construction industry.
At the time, the PQ government came under fire for allegedly lax construction and inspection practices in the province's highway network.
Mr. Despr?s confirmed yesterday that a ministry official on Saturday signed off on the safety of the de la Concorde bridge after a chunk of concrete fell away from the structure barely one hour before the entire section came crashing down.
Provincial police officers alerted his department on Saturday morning at 11:25 that some debris had fallen from the overpass, he said.
A transport official showed up to remove the concrete and conduct a visual and auditory inspection, concluding that the bridge presented no immediate danger.
Then, at 12:33, police were again called to the site after more debris fell.
Four minutes later, a piece of the eastbound three-lane deck on the six-lane bridge slammed to the ground.
The bridge was also thoroughly inspected in May of 2005, Mr. Despr?s said, and no red flags went up at that time.
Mr. Despr?s also said his transport staff worked through the night poring over the designs of all 4,500 Quebec overpasses and bridges and found 20 that will require close review over the next 48 hours.
He announced that he has ordered closed a second nearby Laval overpass as a precaution because it, too, dates from 1970 and is identical in construction to the one that collapsed Saturday.
A third overpass, in the Montreal neighbourhood of Outremont, was also ordered closed yesterday.
Highway 19, an important north-south link between Montreal and its northern suburbs as well as the Laurentian region, is to remain shut for an indefinite period, a situation expected to create havoc for motorists and transit users.
But Mr. Despr?s insisted that Quebec's highway system is not crumbling, despite widely published reports that his own department's figures indicate that almost half of the 4,900 bridges and viaducts are in poor shape.
Municipal officials, including Laval mayor Gilles Vaillancourt, have for years been urging the provincial government to do something about the shabby state of the province's aging highway network.
The Liberal government in Quebec City has over the past three years more than doubled spending on highway maintenance and repairs, to about $200-million this year, Mr. Despr?s said.
Mr. Despr?s said there was absolutely nothing to raise suspicions that the overpass -- only about halfway through its life expectancy of 70 years -- was structurally unsound.
Yet, less than a month ago, Carole Hackenbeck of Montreal was a passenger in a car going up a ramp to the bridge when she says she noticed that there appeared to be unusually large gaps and misaligned spacing in the deck-support structure underneath, along the section that ultimately collapsed.
"I turned to my friend, who was driving me to a medical clinic, and said 'That's not normal. It looks like it's going to fall,' " Ms. Hackenbeck said in an interview.
She made a mental note to report what she saw to the city of Laval after her medical appointment, but said it slipped her mind.
"It's scary," she said.
A. Ghani Razaqpur, an engineering professor at McMaster University in Hamilton and president of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering, said the bridge might have succumbed to a combination of wear-and-tear and corrosion of the steel reinforcement bars inside the concrete.
Overpasses in Quebec and Ontario are particularly vulnerable to corrosion because of the vast amounts of salt used on them to get rid of ice in the harsh winters, he said.
"That's what causes a lot of corrosion and rusting inside [the concrete]," he said.
Mr. Hotte, who was with Ms. Leblanc on the overpass, said he "saw it start to crumble."
"I looked at my girlfriend and the only thing I said was, 'Anne-Marie'," said Mr. Hotte, 41. "Then it went black; it was like an amusement park ride where you go into the dark and you're not sure where you are going to end up. The car just followed the movement of the bridge."
Firefighters and rescue workers used cranes and heavy machinery to break the concrete into smaller pieces in order to get to the flattened cars, which were then shrouded and loaded onto flatbed trucks and transported to a garage to facilitate identification of the victims.
Police spokesman Jayson Gauthier yesterday identified three of the five dead, all residents of Laval who were together in one vehicle: Jean-Pierre Hamel, 40, the driver; his wife Sylvie Baudet, 44, the front-seat passenger; and Mr. Hamel's brother, Gilles Hamel, 44.
The other two victims had yet to be positively identified late yesterday.
Collapse timeline
11:25 a.m. Provincial police call to report concrete falling from de la Concorde overpass.
11:35 a.m. Provincial Transport Department issues media advisory to traffic reporters advising pieces of concrete falling.
11:58 a.m. Transport Department official conducts visual and auditory inspection. Overpass is not closed.
12:33 p.m. Police report second fallen piece of concrete.
12:37 p.m. A 20-metre section of overpass collapses onto highway below.
Sunday
3:50 a.m. After hours of removing debris, rescuers remove first of two vehicles crushed beneath the rubble.
8:39 a.m. Provincial police announce at least four people killed.
9:38 a.m. Death toll climbs to five as officials confirm passenger in second vehicle.
12:33 p.m. Provincial Transport Minister announces public inquiry into collapse.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... y/National
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