By The Canadian Press

One worker dead, two injured after collapse at construction site north of Montreal

May 20, 2025 | 12:18 PM

BLAINVILLE — The underground walls of a construction site north of Montreal collapsed on Tuesday morning, killing one worker and injuring two others.

Police in Blainville, Que., said they received a call around 11 a.m. after the retaining walls of a commercial building under construction gave way. One worker was taken to hospital with a leg injury and another was treated on site.

Lt. Sara Tousignant said the two underground walls fell inward. “We’re talking about the north and northeast walls that collapsed on the workers at that moment,” she said. The victim was found deceased on site, she added.

The victim’s body was still at the wreckage site late Tuesday afternoon because the ground was deemed too unstable for emergency crews to retrieve it, said the head of Blainville’s fire department. Claude Deschuymer said workers were waiting for an engineer to evaluate the stability of one of the walls that remained intact.

“Unfortunately, the victim’s body is in the clay, at the foot of this wall,” he said. “So we can’t risk going there … it’s still cracking, and there are landslides that we see everywhere.”

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He said firefighters used ropes to pull a woman out of a mobile construction office that had fallen into the hole. That person was also sent to hospital, to be treated for shock.

Photos from the site showed the large excavated hole partly filled with piles of wood and metal from the collapse. Excavators sat on the bottom, alongside three pickup trucks that were standing on end against the walls after tumbling over the edge.

Tousignant said there were about 20 workers on the site before the collapse, and that all had been accounted for.

Firefighters from Blainville and nearby Boisbriand responded to the collapse along with police officers. A spokesman for the regional ambulance service confirmed that it had sent four ambulances to the site, and that a person had been taken to hospital.

Quebec Labour Minister Jean Boulet issued a statement on X: “It is with sadness that I learn of the death of a worker in the collapse of a structure in Blainville. I offer my sympathies to their loved ones and colleagues, and I am also thinking of the injured workers.”

He said the province’s workplace safety board and the agency that enforces the construction code will investigate what happened.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 20, 2025.

Pierre Saint-Arnaud, The Canadian Press