It has been seventy years since readers of the Sherbrooke Daily Record woke up to the headline, “Eight feared dead in bridge collapse” following the early morning failure of the Duplessis Bridge in Trois-Rivieres. Over the following days it became clear that the collapse, which saw four spans of the bridge over the St. Maurice River fall through the ice into the river, only resulted in the death of four people due mainly to the fact that it happened shortly before 3 a.m.
Milt Loomis of Waterville was a young cable splicer with the Bell Telephone Company at the time and in the community on another job the when the collapse happened.
“It was quite a night,” he said.
