San .Francisco Bridge

Only one man in the world can tell the story Evan C. Lambert told last week.

He and twelve other men were working up underneath the completed centre span of the new San Francisco-Marin County bridge.* Like wrinkled grey granite, 220 ft. below them ran the swift tidal currents of the Golden Gate. Most of the men were standing on a heavy wooden platform, slung below the rail-girders on steel beams. They were yanking away the boards from beneath the hardened concrete floor of the 4,200-ft. span. Two men were below them picking fallen boards out of the stout hempen safety net that stretched the whole length of the span.

It was about 10 a. m. on Wednesday. On Monday the safety of the platform had been questioned, reinforcing bolts had been put through the brackets which held the four wheels on which the 30-by-60 ft. platform was moved along the rail-girders. On Tuesday, Foreman "Slim" Lambert and his crew had worked all day on the platform. A second platform, not yet in use, was suspended at the first tower on the San Francisco side. Unknown to Lambert, a party of State engineers a few minutes before had pronounced that other platform unsafe, were even then walking out on the bridge to reinspect his platform.

It was warm and sunny up there. The workers were joshing each other about the softness of their jobs. Suddenly there was a jar as a corner bracket snapped and tilted the great platform. "It gave a funny shudder and lurched," said Lambert. In an instant another corner came loose. ''I felt everything slipping. There was nothing to hang to. So I hollered and jumped into the net. I hit the net just before the staging struck it. The net sagged slowly and then the ropes popped and the net gave way with a sound like thunder. It was like a slow motion picture.

''Going down I don't remember a thing except just before I hit the water with the net. Then I tried to jump. I think I succeeded because I wasn't fouled in the net. I went down in the water, not very deep I think, because I came right up again. I saw some timber and grabbed on. Near me I saw feet. I pulled the body up. It was Fred Dummatzen. I looked around. There, tangled in the net was Noel Flowers. I yelled asking could he cut himself out. He just looked at me. God! What a horrified look! Then he went down."

Twenty minutes later, swept almost a mile toward the sea by the outgoing tide, Lambert was rescued by a fishing boat. He still had an arm around Dummatzen. But Dummatzen was dead.

Of the other eleven men, Carpenter Oscar Osberg was picked out of the bay badly injured, the two who had been down in the net were evidently crushed when it fell. Their bodies, with seven others, were swept out to sea.

Workers up on the bridge watched the crash with horror. "The whole bridge structure shook when the net broke," said one. Peter Anderson, working just above the platform, watched his brother's body spin and twist down and away. Workers raced along the bridge seeking life preservers, found only fire extinguishers. Bridge whistles stopped all work and everyone looked down at the Coast Guard boats circling below.

If there can be a smile in such a tragedy, it came from the 13th man, a spry little Irishman named Tom Casey who felt the staging going, grasped a caster overhead and dangled for seven minutes. "It seemed a hell of a lot longer than that to me!" he said. Workers from above lowered a looped cable through which he inserted his legs, permitting them to hoist him to safety. Not until then did he unclench his teeth from his pipe, let it drop down, down into the Bay.

As four inquiries began, work was indefinitely suspended under the centre span pending restoration of the safety net, more than half of which was torn away in the crash. Costing $82,000, it had saved eleven workers up to last week. Prior to last week only one life had been lost building this bridge. The San Francisco-Oakland Bridge, built without a net, cost 24 lives.

*Scheduled to open May 28.

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