Criminal investigation underway after fatal Blainville construction site wall collapse

A criminal investigation has been launched in Blainville after a 31-year-old man was killed and three others were injured when a retaining wall collapsed at a construction site Tuesday.

Officials at the construction site are under investigation for negligence, a spokesperson for the Blainville police told CityNews.

“We want to know if what happened yesterday was due to human error, and led to the victim’s death,” Lt. Sara Tousignant explained Wednesday.

“After that, we can close those doors if they need to be closed, but right now it’s about validating the possible nature of the incident.”

Tousignant says part of the investigation will include interviewing witnesses over the “next few hours, next few days.”

The site of the collapse was an under-construction commercial-residential complex. Some 20 workers were onsite at the time, working on a two-storey underground parking garage dug some 60 feet into the ground.

The worker killed has been identified as Alexandre Paris, who was working for a subcontracting company. His body was buried in clay-like soil when retaining walls at the construction site collapsed late Tuesday morning, and later recovered by firefighters shortly after 8 p.m.

Blainville fire department director Claude Deschuymer said that the recovery operation was complicated by the soil consistency after the rain, but he would not say it was the cause for the wall collapse.

“The kind of ground we had here soaked up a lot of water. That’s why the operation was more difficult and very dangerous to go there,” Deschuymer said.

“If we send firemen there to remove the body, we had to be sure there was no more collapse of the wall on them, because it was still moving, still at the scene, sand dropping. We had to prepare our operation exactly, meticulously, to be sure we could go fast to remove the body from the clay. That’s why everything was complicated.”

The operation to recover the body took about two to three hours. Deschuymer said it was “like a surgery.”

“That’s not normal, that’s very difficult,” said of the operation.

The incident and the loss of the life have impacted members in the community.

“It’s hard to get this out of our heads,” said Gilles, who works in the area. “It’s certain that when someone dies here, it’s a big deal. 31 years old is young.”

Djamal Yahiaoue, who also works in the area, said, “I’m a bit sad to see this, it’s my usual route.”

According to authorities, one worker sustained a leg injury and was brought to hospital, while another was treated onsite for a minor injury.

A third worker was inside a construction trailer at the time of the collapse, which reportedly “fell into the hole” created when the retaining walls gave way. She was eventually rescued and lifted to safety – then transported to hospital to be treated for nervous shock.

Three vehicles belonging to workers there were also swallowed by the gaping pit where the building’s foundation was to be poured.

The president of Syscomax Immobilier, the general contractor leading the first phase of the building’s construction, told CityNews they are shutting down all of their construction sites Wednesday.

Jean-Philip Robitaille adds the company is focused on taking care of its employees, providing emotional and psychological support. Robitaille says Syscomax is collaborating with the investigation by the Commission des normes, de l’équité, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail (CNESST), which is parallel to the police investigation.

Police spokesperson Tousignant could not say when the Blainville construction site could be reopened given a multitude of moving parts.

“Engineers will need to evaluate the structure,” she said. “For that other portion of the construction site, engineers will decide that. For the criminal investigation, we need to protect the scene … police haven’t evaluated the scene. So it remains closed at the criminal level. There’s also a safety issue, CNESST, so there are many people doing checks before access to the site is granted.”

At a press conference Wednesday on the status of negotiations in the residential construction sector – the CSN-Construction union’s vice president Félix Ferland said that there are many factors, including the heavy rain over the weekend that may have changed the soil’s consistency. 

“It’s very difficult to explain why this happened yesterday. At the CSN-Construction, there are new provisions that ensure that there are Health and Safety representatives onsite. So, a CSN representative was present at this site. That same morning, he made recommendations to the project managers, after seeing the wall had certain movements. So, they had apparently planned a survey team in the afternoon to come and measure everything,” said Ferland.

Ferland said there were still many unanswered questions, “I know that there was a representative of the employer who went that same morning, he went down into the excavation, and then he looked at everything. So was the engineer’s inspection done properly? Was the work done correctly at the drilling level? Several questions arise.”

Syscomax is collaborating with the investigation from Quebec workers’ safety board the CNESST, which is parallel to the police investigation.

—With files from The Canadian Press