She is more than 50 years old, the Sint Lucas Church that stands between the Zuiderparkweg and the César Francklaan in Den Bosch. What many people do not know is that about ten years before, there was a completely different building of God with exactly the same name. But that collapsed in 1968 with thunderous roar. It costs a 12-year-old boy’s life, his mother is seriously injured. A group of about twenty scouting gnomes and their supervisors know how to flee the building just in time. The builders appear to have stacked wrong on error.
It is an ice -cold, cloudy day and due to the stiff wind it feels even more corent this Saturday, January 13, 1968. In the night the mercury just did not fall to the -20 and much warmer than a degree or minus six it will not be.
A group of about twenty gnomes from the Scouting Edith Stein Group from Den Bosch walks with their supervisor Rita Waslander (23) and Mrs. Hagemans through the only five -year -old Sint Lucaskerk. Is it beautiful? Mwah, that is a name that may not really fit with this loggge colossus that was built in the early 1960s and has a nickname ‘the fort’. Architect Jan de Jong and Nico van der Laan, born in Lith, offers space for a thousand churchgoers and costs the sweet sum of 900,000 guilders.
Thunderous blow
The scouts are about to leave the crypt, the underground space where relics are kept. It is time to keep the girls busy in a different way. They are going to collect grass and sticks to build dolls from them. But suddenly a thunderous blow sounds. “The ceiling of the crypt moved. Fabric penetrated,” Rita Waslander told one of the many newspapes They write about the disaster.
A few children start screaming in panic, but Rita thinks it’s not so bad and reassures them. “My first reaction was: the organ will have come down.” But that changes quickly when her colleague Hagemans Gilt in Paniek: “Out!”
They run outside and see that the entire porch of roughly 33 meters long and five meters high and the Sacrament Chapel have been lazed down. “We were lucky,” said Rita. “If we had come out of the crypt two minutes earlier, we would almost certainly have been buried under the rubble of the Sacrament Chapel.”
That is exactly what happened to 12-year-old Hans van de Leemput and his mother (49). “I heard moaning under the rubble,” says Miss de Kok who lives right opposite the church and came to the noise. “Mrs. Van de Leemput lay under a lump of concrete. Hans, her son, must have been killed instantly. He was lying with one leg under his mother.”
Latest sacraments
The woman is taken from under the rubble and taken seriously injured to the hospital. She appears to have contracted a pelvic invoice, internal bruises and a shock. Pastor J. Smulders admits both her and her son the last sacraments. The spiritual, which laid the first stone of the building, is reading during the disaster in the nearby parsonage and finds it incomprehensible what happened. Shortly before, he was still in church to check if everything is ready for the evening mass. “I didn’t notice anything. Everything seemed fine.”
The emergency services fear that there are many more victims and fifty soldiers from the barracks in Vught are starting to search under the rubble. Miraculously, they don’t find anyone anymore.
Research agency TNO is called in and the conclusions After months of investigation are downright shocking. A center column, one of the pillars under the construction, appears to have been made with poor material. The disaster has even been enlarged by an armed concrete beam that has been made so worthless that, like a roof plate, it is finally broken in half. But that’s not the only thing. Important construction calculations contain errors or are completely completely and the concrete and concrete steel of the brickwork are not sufficiently resistant to moisture.
Short and good, the construction company has delivered dangerous fiddling work and seems to have wanted to save the costs. And that costs 12-year-old Hans his life.
Past
Aflied past is a weekly section about fun, remarkable or funny facts from the rich Brabant past. If you have a tip, mail to: [email protected].