Today’s Collapsed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
It was just after ten A.M. on Thursday, April 27, 1978. Work was well underway on Tower #2 at the Allegheny Power Station in Willow Island, West Virginia. The “natural draft” cooling tower was to be 430 feet tall when completed. Carpenters, electricians, ironworkers and concrete workers were busy on a huge scaffold inside the unfinished tower. The scaffold was bolted to the concrete after the wooden forms were removed, and was thus able to move higher as each level of concrete was poured. A crane sat atop the scaffold, hauling buckets of wet concrete up as needed. At ten A.M. the tower had risen to 168 feet, and the day’s third load of wet concrete was on its way up to be poured.
Without warning, the hoist cable went slack, and the crane tipped over toward the inside of the tower. The men working on the ground inside barely had time to dive under the truck ramp or move to the center before the concrete interior began to fall, spiraling down “more or less like you would peel an apple” as one police officer put it. The entire scaffold came thundering down in an avalanche of concrete, wooden forms and steel rods.
There were 51 men working on the scaffolding. All were killed instantly. Some were so badly damaged they could only be identified by the contents of their pockets. The men who’d been working on the ground survived. Rescue squads who arrived at the site found there was nothing for them to do, nobody to rescue; there were only the dead to be recovered.
The close-knit rural community of Pleasants County was devastated. Ten of the men killed were members of one family: a man lost his uncle, four brothers and five cousins. Brothers Edgar and Ray Duelley were inseparable, always working together. But on that spring morning, Edgar must have had a premonition. He told his brother “No, Buck, I don’t want to go on that tower” and was working in another area of the site when he heard the roar of the collapse and knew that Ray was gone. An investigation concluded that in an effort to speed up completion of the cooling tower, the concrete was not given time to dry and cure properly, causing it to crumble when the crane fell against it. No criminal charges were filed.
Culled from: Gen Disasters and Wikipedia
Submitted by Aimee
Aimee’s comment: Haste makes waste; a waste of human lives.
If I have to go, I want it to be quick.