A crane carrying a church steeple collapsed in front of a crowd in Milton on the South Shore on Friday afternoon.
The steeple was being removed from the 150-year-old Milton Christian Church on Highway 8 at about 2:30 p.m. when the crane buckled and the steeple came crashing to the ground.
Kimberly Sinclair was watching the operation with her husband and children and started recording the manoeuvre on her phone just after the steeple was lifted from the church.
“All of a sudden when it’s moving, you hear this noise. It’s like this groaning metal fatigue. It was not a good noise. It was a noise you hear when you know something’s gone horribly wrong,” she said.
In Sinclair’s video, the crane moves the steeple away from the building and then lowers it, but suddenly the steeple drops straight down and then smashes into pieces on the ground.
“That’s when I grabbed the kids and started hustling them as far back off the road as possible,” she said. “Because when it hit, debris started flying. There was asphalt shingles, there was pieces of wood, there’s a bunch of drywall, whatever was inside the steeple, as soon as it hit, that was flying.”
And that wasn’t all.
“The boom buckled. It literally snapped in half,” Sinclair said. “Then the boom came down and that’s what fell on top of the wires, so then the wires all up and down the road start snapping and transformers start blowing and people are running.
“The whole time, people are scattering trying to get out of the way. It was kind of like a scene in a movie. It was really unreal.”
Kenny Veinot of Liverpool was also observing the proceedings along with a crowd of about 100 people.
“As soon as he lifted it, you could see the boom bending and you could hear metal creaking,” he said. “You knew something was going to happen.”
Veinot believes the crane operator knew something wasn’t quite right.
“He knew he was in trouble right away,” he said. “He swung it over to get that down to the road as fast as he could, and it broke before he got it down to the ground.”
Veinot said aside from his friend, who was struck in the shoulder by a power line, no one was injured. His friend was not seriously injured.
“Right afterwards there was a lot of screaming and stuff. I think everybody was just worried that everybody was OK,” Veinot said. “In all honesty, nobody got hurt, which is pretty amazing. That’s a blessing.”
Sharon McKenzie, a member of the church’s project planning committee, said a new, smaller church is being built on the same site closer to the Mersey River. Parts of the old church, including its oak ceiling, will be moved to the new church, but the steeple wasn’t going to be reused.
The old church was too large for the congregation size, too energy inefficient and not wheelchair accessible, McKenzie said.
“I'm not sad,” she said of the loss of the steeple. “I’m sure it’s sad for some people, but we’ve been going through a deconstruction process, so the church is a shell now. I think a lot of people have shed most of their tears.”
Traffic was affected in the area for several hours, and power was disrupted to many nearby homes until late Friday evening.
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