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In 1907, the Quebec Bridge was touted as one of the world's great engineering projects. Its 1,800-foot central span was going to establish a double world record, for the longest cantilever span and the longest bridge span. Yet as the southern half of the bridge neared completion at the end of August that year, it suddenly collapsed, killing seventy-five workers and injuring eleven others. Photographs showing millions of tons of steel wreckage highlighted the scale of the catastrophe (fig. 1). Engineering News, the American civil engineering journal, dubbed it "the greatest engineering disaster" ever and "a peculiarly heavy blow to the engineering profession," adding that "for decades to come, the Quebec disaster will be quoted, in public and in private, as an unanswerable proof of the unreliability of engineers and their works." ' It is still regarded today as one of the world's major structural failures, and its story continues to be told and retold-in part so that engineering students will learn from it.2
But the conventional view of this tragic event is flawed. It has been shaped principally by the conclusions of the Canadian Royal Commission established in 1907 to investigate the causes of the collapse. The commission's report blamed two individuals, Theodore Cooper and Peter L. Szlapka, concluding that "the failure cannot be attributed directly to any cause other than errors in judgment on the part of these two engineers."3 This assessment belied evidence presented in hundreds of pages of oral testimony taken by the commission, other evidence from original documents and correspondence, and information presented in the report's numerous appendices.4 It was also contradicted by the subsequent responses of many contemporary engineers and public officials to the collapse. The combined weight of this evidence suggests, rather, that the errors behind the collapse were rooted in the project's organizational culture.5
This article argues that organizational factors contributed directly to the three key technical errors the Royal Commission deemed responsible for the bridge's collapse: flawed design of the main compression chords, underestimation of the bridge's weight, and the decision to allow unprecedented stress limits.6 Organizational analysis reveals that the erroneous weight estimate was not an accidental oversight by Szlapka and Cooper, as the Royal Commission claimed, but a direct consequence of the contracting company's...