March 19, 2010

The commemorative quilt, Breaking Ground, created by Laurie Swim, will be unveiled Wednesday and displayed permanently at York Mills subway station.

Hogg's Hollow tragedy | 50 years later

Deaths of five immigrant workers changed jobsites forever

Devastating accident prompted health and safety reform in Ontario

VINCE VERSACE

staff writer

Dusty, dirty and tired, the construction workers sit, swaying side to side with each lurch and stop of the College Steet streetcar. The late day sun streams in through the windows.

The streetcar reaches the Euclid Avenue stop. A dozen of these hard-working immigrant men slowly get up. Backs ache, calloused hands burn but they have survived another day at a Toronto-area construction site.

In the days after the Hogg’s Hollow tragedy of March 17, 1960, remembered today on its 50th anniversary, many such men were thankful to reach the end of the work day, as were their loved ones.

“My sister and I used to sit on the front stoop every night waiting for my father to turn the corner. Hogg’s Hollow was an absolutely devastating experience,” recalls Cosmo Manella, director, health and safety, Labourers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA).

“That was the kind of anxiety we all felt as children of immigrant construction workers during that period. The elation when we saw my father and uncles turn the corner is still vivid to this day.”

Pasquale Allegrezza, Giovanni Battista Carriglio, Giovanni Fusillo, Alessandro and Guido Mantella, known as “sandhogs” for the tunneling work they did, all lost their lives 50 years ago in a Hogg’s Hollow watermain tunnel.

A brutal combination of carbon monoxide poisoning and drowning in silt and water took their lives after a fire started underground. Breaking Ground, a commemorative quilt about the tragedy by Laurie Swim, will be unveiled today and displayed permanently at York Mills subway station.

The deaths of these workers was a rallying cry for health and safety reform in Ontario, casting a piercing light on the poor working conditions a majority of immigrant labourers were subjected to.

“Hogg’s Hollow changed forever the relationship of immigrants to the City of Toronto. The city had been built by immigrants and for many years they were treated with disdain and not afforded the respect they were due,” explains John Cartwright, president, Toronto and York Region Labour Council.

The poorly lit tunnel in which the five workers died was 35 feet underground and ran below the Don River, near Yonge Street and York Mills.

It was six feet in diameter and had a 36- inch watermain running through it. Air pressure was used to compensate for soft tunneling conditions, helping to avoid cave-ins and the entry of water and silt. However, it also created an oxygen-rich environment where one spark could create a wildfire.

“That job they were on was a haywire job,” says Nester Buchinski, 75, who entered the smoke and silt-filled tunnel to try and save the trapped men. “The company did not know enough about construction. They wanted to make money and ended up taking five lives out of there.”

The project, worth $300,000 at the time, would eventually result in a watermain connection from the Armor Heights Pumping Station to the water distribution network at Victoria Park Avenue and York Mills Road.

TORONTO POLICE SERVICES

Deadly fumes filled the tunnel, trapping five of six men working there. When emergency personnel turned off an air compressor to stop feeding the flames, silt and water filled the tunnel, sealing the fate of the five men inside.

Jack Harrop Construction was originally responsible for the project but ran into “financial difficulties,” city officials said at the time, and a trust company had taken over the job.

There were six men in the tunnel when a cutting torch ignited the rubberized electrical cable it was attached to. Once the fire started, it roared off in the oxygen-rich environment, further fueled by oil residue courtesy of the poorly serviced air compressor, an inquest would reveal.

Deadly fumes filled the cavern. One worker managed to escape, but the other five could not see their way to safety. In order to avoid noxious fumes, they ran from the lone exit, blocked by fire, and headed towards the opposite end of the tunnel which ended at a concrete bulkhead 300 feet away. Before making that fateful walk towards the bulkhead one man had almost made it out, foreman Charles Valentini told a Toronto Daily Star reporter at the scene.

“I held one of their hands. I had to let go because of the heat. It was hell.”

Investigators found that no fire extinguishers, resuscitator masks, or flashlights were in the tunnel, nor any telephone system set up. When emergency personnel turned off the air compressor, in order to stop feeding the flames oxygen, they sealed the fate of the five men underground. With no pressure, water and silt started to seep in, filling the tunnel and piling up near the bulkhead, where the workers would later be found. An inquest would reveal some of the workers had water and silt in their lungs, pointing to an excruciating drowning death.

Buchinski, 26 at the time, was one of four men who volunteered for a rescue effort.

He had once worked with “some of the boys” who were trapped. The confined conditions in the tunnel meant rescuers had to squirm their way through heavy amounts of silt and water.

“We went in just over 100 feet. It was dark and there was a lot of water. We found one body lying over top of the pipe,” recalls Buchinski somberly. “We went by him for another 20 feet and then found all the silt piled high, maybe a foot from the ceiling of the tunnel.”

Buchinski remembers to this day the chaos and pain that awaited them above ground once they emerged with the one deceased worker they found.

“It was a hard thing to do, there were hundreds of people there with so much family of those guys,” he says. “When I came up, I did not want to be the one to say it was hopeless. We said things like ‘We don’t know’, ‘We did not go to the end’, and ‘They could be on the other side of the silt’.”

Buchinski was plagued with nightmares for years after the incident. The helplessness he felt that night is still very real today.

“I didn’t know what I was getting into,” says Buchinski during an interview at his west Toronto home. “It was at night and I didn’t even know it was under the river. We were stupid to go into a place like that in those conditions.”

Carmen Principato, LIUNA Local 506 business manager, was 19 when the tragedy occurred. He remembers hearing about it on his car radio as he drove home from work. He went by the accident scene not just for curiosity sake, but because five Italians had died.

“I felt destroyed and went home and said to my wife, ‘Let’s go back to Italy, there is no security or safety here’.”

It would take three days for rescuers to retrieve the bodies. The Mantella brothers were found together in positions of prayer. No charges were ever laid in subsequent investigations.

The Italian community and immigrants in construction were filled with rage and sorrow over the tragedy. As Toronto grew its borders and infrastructure, fatal accidents had become too frequent.

“This disaster is one more illustration of the high cost a great city pays for its growth and the role the Italian-born builder has played on the development of Toronto,” stated a Toronto Daily Star editorial at the time.

Crusading reporter Frank Drea would shine an intense spotlight on the plight of immigrant construction workers and the mobilization of the union movement in Italian immigrant construction.

“Those five men were considered martyrs. It was the spark in a dry forest,” explains John Stefanini, former LIUNA Local 183 business manager, who was 19 in 1960. “There were quite a few accidents. The hours were long. The pay was low and no benefits. Worst of all, after working under such conditions, quite often there were NSF cheques. These men found themselves with only a piece of paper.”

Gerry Gallagher was business manager of Local 183 at the time. His leadership in the days following the tragedy is lauded to this day. He had tried to unionize the Hogg’s Hollow project prior to its collapse, notes Mike Gallagher, Gerry’s son and current head of Operating Engineers Local 793.

“He was horrified at the job’s safety conditions and at what prevailed all over the province,” Gallagher explains. “After the disaster, he pushed for stricter regulations in tunnel sites where compressed air was used.”

Gallagher played a prominent part in establishing the Royal Commission on Industrial Safety, known as the McAndrew Commission. Stefanini remembers how the immigrant construction community galvanized itself in the tragedy’s aftermath. Well into the 1970s, changes continued to be made in Ontario workplace health and safety laws thanks to the powerful organization of immigrant workers and trade unions, he says.

With each rally and strike, a societal shift unfolded beyond project sites and into the fabric of Toronto’s immigrant community. Italians began to find themselves in political and school board circles.

“You must remember in the 1960s Italians were still the so-called enemy. They were called wops and displaced persons,” recalls Stefanini, now 69. “There was a high degree of discrimination, it was the atmosphere of that time A lot has changed since then, and I’d say 99 per cent of Italians are now very grateful to this country. We are not held back by our past.”

The impact of Hogg’s Hollow was also felt beyond the borders of Toronto’s construction community. Hamilton-based Joseph Mancinelli, LIUNA’s international vice-president and central and eastern Canada regional manager, remembers his construction worker father and friends talking about Hogg’s Hollow a decade after it happened.

“It was continuously brought up as an example of things that could have been avoided if our people had the opportunity to speak up and if there had been legislation to protect them,” says Mancinelli.

Surprisingly, as the 40th anniversary of the tragedy approached, union and community members discovered there was no official plaque or recognition of the incident in the city. Toronto eventually erected a plaque at the site and preparations began for a memorial of some kind, resulting in the Breaking Ground quilt. The fundamental legacy of Hogg’s Hollow stretches beyond hard hats and union politics, adds Cartwright.

“Wave after wave of immigrants that subsequently came to this city all owe a debt of gratitude to those five men, their sacrifice and the courage of the Italian community which demanded a new deal for immigrants in this city.”

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