THE TRAGEDY
Events Leading Up to the Collapse | Unbolting of 4-5 Splice on 10-11 North | The Collapse
The Survivors | The Heroes | The Victims
The Immediate Aftermath
Almost as soon as he put the phone down, Gerit Hardenberg heard the low rumbling sound coming across the river. It grew, like the side of a mountain falling on top of him, and then faded into silence.
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What Gerit Hardenberg could not hear was the eerie pinging noise that came from the flakes of rust peeling off weathered steel or the jarring screech of metal moving slowly across metal.
What he could not see was the men holding their hands to their ears to block out the noise or the look of terror in their faces as they saw things that should have been firm and solid begin to move and parts of the metal's colour change to a strange kind of blue.
The whole 2,000-ton mass plummeted into the Yarra mud with an explosion of gas, dust and mangled metal that shook buildings hundreds of yards away. Homes were spattered with flying mud. The roar of the impact, the explosion and the fire that followed could be heard more than two miles away.
But by the time men, who had been hurled into the river below, had surfaced from the depths all they could hear was the clanging of loose metal and the crackle of the fire. As they clawed their muddy, oil-soaked bodies out of the river those who could walk or talk began searching and calling out for their mates. The huge span lay like a broken and beached battleship beside them and, as they heard the first shrill sounds of the sirens, they knew it was time to comfort the injured and count the dead.
The rescue teams found 32 bodies that day . men like Jouzaf Ozelis, 23, of North Altona, who was planning to marry 19-year-old Regina Buzinkas; Cyril Carmichael, 19, of North Fitzroy, who was about to announce his engagement to Glenys Fone; George Tsehilios, 32, who had sold his blacksmith shop in Greece to come to Australia and had saved for eight years to buy a home in Altona for his wife and two sons.
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There was Ross Bigmore, 22 of Reservoir, a carpenter who was to have married Maureen Jones on Melbourne Cup Day, November 3, and Tony Falzon, 32, also a carpenter, who had emigrated from Malta seven years before. Then there was foreman Charles Lund, 41, who had already packed his bags to leave the bridge and take his wife, Leigh, and seven children up to Queensland where he would work on the Mackay Bridge and be near his mother.
Irene Woods rushed from her job to be with her four children when she learned her husband, Pat, 32, had been killed.
Mrs Butters of Edna Grove, East Coburg , had to wait eight days for the body of her husband, Bernard, 49, to float to the surface after crumpled scaffolding was moved. "I knew it was hopeless after the first night", she said. "It was only a matter of time".
And there was Ian Miller, Jack Hindshaw, Bill Harburn, Bob West, Jack Grist, Fred Upsdell and Victor Gerada, and the others.
Extract from "West Gate" by Bill Hitchings
