John Deans was excoriated for his abysmally poor judgment during the final crisis, and the Quebec Bridge Company was criticized for appointing the unqualified Edward Hoare as the responsible engineer at the site. But the brunt of the blame was placed on the shoulders of Theodore Cooper and Peter Szlapka. Cooper had examined and approved Szlapka's design for the bridge. "The failure," said the commissioners, "cannot be attributed directly to any cause other than errors in judgment on the part of these two engineers...A grave error was made in assuming the dead load for the calculations at too low a value...This error was of sufficient magnitude to have required the condemnation of the bridge, even if the details of the lower chords had been of sufficient strength."
The second Quebec Bridge was completed in 1917. Weighing two and a half times more than its ill-fated predecessor, it has stood without any additional reinforcement since the day it opened. It did undergo a calamity of its own, however. In 1916 its prefabricated central span dropped into the river while being raised into place, killing eleven.
Theodore Cooper's career ended with the collapse of the first Quebec Bridge. He testified twice before the Royal Commission, speaking candidly and with some bitterness toward both the Phoenix and Quebec bridge companies. His testimony brought forth a fusillade of countercharges from officials at Phoenixville and Quebec. With that last tremor of the tragedy behind him, Cooper retired from public life. He died at home on August 24, 1919, at the age of eighty.
Several months after the disaster, a party of engineering students from McGill and Laval universities made an excursion to the site of the ruins that had been the first Quebec Bridge. There was little they could learn from the tortured steel; the Royal Commission had already pronounced it of strictly limited value to its own investigation.
What lessons the debris contained had to be gleaned on levels other than the purely technical. And if the twisted metal spelled out anything to the young engineering students as they made their way around it, the message was this: Any great bridge builder is by nature a figure of hubris. Here is what happens when hubris goes insufficiently checked by deliberation and exquisite care in the face of the little known. You may not think this could happen to you, but it can. It can happen to anyone who dares to build. It happened here to the best of them.
