Bill Hitchings

Failure of design. Failure of process. Failure of duty of care.

The Royal Commission into the Failure of the West Gate Bridge, chaired by Mr Justice Barber, commenced on 28 October 1970 and concluded on 14 July 1971. The Commission completed collecting the evidence from 52 witnesses in May 1971, It had sat for 73 days - broken only for Christmas and Easter - and had listened to more than two million words of evidence.

The Commissioners took little more than a month to complete their weighty 300-page, 8000 word report, and it was released in the Victorian Parliament on 3 August 1971.

On the morning of 15 October, Ian Miller walked on to the span he and the men had just recently put in place on top of the huge 155ft concrete piers on the west side of the River Yarra. His colleague Jack Hindshaw was there. They waved a greeting to each other.

Jack, 42, the resident engineer for the bridge designers, Freeman Fox and Partners, had been sent out from London. Only a few weeks before, Ian and Jack had assured the men the bridge was safe after a similar bridge at Milford Haven, Wales, had collapsed and killed four men. Now this span was giving trouble.

Fellow workers refused to rest until everyone had been found

As news of the crash hit Melbourne the Government declared a disaster plan and all available firemen, ambulance officers and policemen were called in. The police threw a cordon around the disaster area, breaking it only for the constant stream of ambulances, nurse, doctors, priests, Salvation army workers, Boy Scouts and men among the passers-by who converged on the broken bridge to do what they could.

John Laino, who had been digging since he came down with the bridge, helped identify the dead and the unconscious injured.