SEATTLE — It remains the deadliest crane disaster in Seattle history, causing a couple to transform their grief into action. This, in a city whose skyline still boasts the largest number of construction cranes in the U.S.
Saturday marks five years since a construction crane on Mercer Street fell to earth into Saturday afternoon traffic and into the history books.
Vehicles were crushed, four people, killed instantly, four people hurt, and untold other lives, shattered.
One still-grieving couple turned their heartbreak into a clarion call for change.
It was the darkest of days for Andrea Wang and she remembers as though it was yesterday.
“You know, I just go through the motions of the entire day in my head,” said Wang, looking away.
Her daughter, Sarah Wong, was a student at Seattle Pacific University.
“You know, from the moment when I spoke to her on the phone that morning, you know, in preparation for coming up to Seattle to visit her,” said Wang. “To telling her to call her grandfather that day ‘cause it was his birthday. To the moment I was teaching. To the phone call I got from my husband. I just replay the whole day.”
That day was April 27, 2019.
“And I never did find out if she was able to make that phone call to my father,” she said, wistfully.
Nineteen-year-old Sarah Wong was the youngest of those who died that fateful Saturday. Two construction workers, Andrew Yoder and Travis Corbet, were dismantling the construction crane towering over what would become the Google A-I building.
A sudden burst of wind blew the massive crane onto busy Mercer Street and into the path of Alan Justad, a longtime spokesman for what is now Seattle’s Department of Construction and Inspections. He died. Yoder and Corbet died, too.
“It’s another day of living in the grief,” said Henry Wong.
Wong was Sarah’s father.
“So, Saturday will just be another day in this grief journey that we’re on,” he said.
But that journey of grief has turned into their life’s mission.
“We don’t want this to happen to any other family, ever again,” Andrea.
So, they enlisted the help of Washington state legislators.
“I introduced a bill in 2020 to take up the issue of crane safety,” said State Senator Karen Keiser. “And I met universal resistance from the industry.”
Sen. Keiser was among the first to join the arduous fight for change.
“And we didn’t make much progress that first year,” she said. “But I got $300,000 in the budget to increase the number of crane inspectors at the Department of Labor and Industries. And we’ve been adding two inspectors every year since. We’re up to 10 inspectors. At the time, we were down to two inspectors for the whole state.
Then this year, Gov. Jay Inslee signed into law a groundbreaking brand new set of standards for all crane companies, civil penalties, too.
A metal cross honoring Yoder and Corbet is the only visible reminder of the terrible tragedy at the spot five years ago. But those who were the most intimately impacted by what happened say they that this will be the last monument ever erected for anyone whose life is taken suddenly because a crane collapsed.
“It’s been a process to get to this point to know what we were going to do,” said Andrea Wang, “even though we had a commitment at minute one, that something had to be done.”
A minute of tragedy that will last a lifetime.
Andrea Wang and Henry Wong say their work is still not done. They will work with the state Department of Labor & Industries to write brand new safety rules for tower cranes.
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