The Persistent Tunnel “Vision” of British Columbia’s George Massey

Photo Credit: Stephen Rees

Have you ever met someone who was so dedicated to making a dream come true despite all the swirling negativity about that dream? Sometimes it seems as if no one can understand that person’s dream and especially what seems to be a fool-hearty waste of time in trying to make it a reality. This is exactly what happened to George Massey from Ladner, British Columbia. For nearly twenty years, Massey put his own time and money into trying to convince anyone who would listen to him that a tunnel could be built under the south arm of the Fraser River to connect Delta with Richmond. Canadian based engineering firms told him he was crazy while the BC Government reps got to the point where they would almost hide under the table when Massey would come knocking on the door with more information to argue his case. But if anything can be learned, the story of George Massey is proof that persistence and passionate dedication to a cause will make any dream come true. 

Photo Credit: Delta Optimist

Nehemiah Massey was born in 1903 at Courtown Harbour in County Wexford, Ireland. Upon arriving to Canada with his family in the early 1930s, he anglicised his name to George Massey. In 1936, Massey sold his automotive mechanics business in Regina and moved to Ladner, British Columbia which is part of the municipality of Delta. At that time, the only way to get into Richmond or Vancouver from Delta was to take a ferry across the south arm of the Fraser River estuary. Massey immediately wondered why there was no tunnel to link the two land areas. Although he had the equivalent of a grade three level education from Ireland, Massey was a keen reader on engineering and machinery topics throughout his entire life and through those readings, he felt an underwater tunnel was more efficient and cost effective than a bridge and it could better address the challenges of dealing with population increases in years to come far more than any ferry service could. However, Massey’s biggest challenge would be to convince others of his findings.

By day, George Massey owned and operated the Massey Machine Shop which stood along the harbour in Ladner. During the course of his career, he had met a number of contacts in the BC provincial government plus engineers and architects around the world. By night, Massey utilised these contacts by writing thousands of letters, placing phone calls, making presentations and lobbying as hard as he could to propose the building of an underwater tunnel that would allow vehicles and transport trucks to safely and quickly get from Delta to Richmond while still allowing ocean freighters access up the Fraser River to ports in New Westminster and beyond. Massey had collected statistical data on soil analysis and topography and had discovered that the Fraser River situation was very similar to that of the Maas River in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Between 1937 and 1942, a six lane, squared shaped tunnel complete with bicycle and pedestrian lanes, was built under the Rotterdam harbour and named Maastunnel. It was the first prefabricated, sectional concrete tunnel in the world and Massey saw no reason, based on his research and data, why this could not also be done under the south arm of the Fraser River. So intrigued with the Rotterdam project, Massey made several phone calls to the engineering firm of Christiani and Nielsen of Denmark, who won the contract to construct Maastunnel, to pitch his idea. The company was intrigued and agreed that the two locations seemed very similar in topography, soil sediments and tidal strengths. Rudolf Christiani planned to come to Vancouver and meet with Massey and begin designing some preliminary plans for the Delta to Richmond tunnel project. However, this Danish engineering company was the only firm who understood Massey’s vision and he had great difficulty in getting Canadian engineering firms to listen to him. To add further insult to injury for Massey, British Columbia politics of the 1930s had very different ideas about his project
proposal.

Photo Credit: City of New Westminster Archives

In the 1930s, the Patullo Bridge was being built further east along the Fraser to link New Westminster with north Surrey. The BC Liberal government, led by Premier Thomas Dufferin Patullo, argued that bridges were more structurally sound, safer for citizens and he believed bridges to be the wave of the future in the development of Vancouver and the greater Lower Mainland area. Patullo simply refused to consider Massey’s idea and brushed it off as a crazy, foolish idea. By 1938, Patullo stopped returning Massey’s calls and didn’t answer his letters. When the provincial political landscape changed in the early 1940s with the creation of the Liberal/Conservative coalition to stop the rise of the CCF, Massey hoped the new Premier, John Hart, would reopen talks about constructing the tunnel. But Massey faced the same criticism and negativity from Hart as he did from Patullo. By 1948, Massey knew he needed to have public backing for his proposal in order to make some political ground so he created the Lower Fraser River Improvement Crossing Association. With this Association now in place, he began receiving hundreds of letters of support from citizens who wanted a better way to cross the Fraser into Richmond and Vancouver. Those letters of support also included the backing of the Chrisitiani and Nielsen engineering firm. With his public profile increasing over the years in the community, Massey was urged by citizens to run as a Social Credit MLA candidate for Ladner. He figured if he were to have a seat in the provincial Legislature, this might help him find the political support for his cause . Massey won the seat for Ladner and went to Victoria in 1956. Finally, after years of seemingly talking in the wind to himself, the new Socred Premier who had come on the scene in 1952, was the only leader to seriously listen to Massey’s argument for a tunnel and not a bridge.

Photo Credit: Library and Archives Canada, PA-115138.

The Social Credit party’s William Andrew Cecil Bennett served as one of BC’s longest running Premiers from 1952 to 1972, which has been called the Golden Era of BC politics. Bennett was born in New Brunswick and later moved to Kelowna where he owned and operated a successful chain of five hardware stores. He was elected Premier on his promise to revamp the corrupted BC Hospital Insurance Plan which had come under fire for its poor record keeping and overcharging on health premiums. He fixed the BC medical systemand also became a key player on the national scene, alongside Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas, in creating a universal health services plan for all Canadians. WAC Bennett was also a keen believer in creating mega projects which he argued would create jobs, boost the economy and pave the way for future technological advancements in the province of British Columbia. Some of those projects included the Peace River’s WAC Bennett Dam, the Duncan Dam, creation
of the Bank of British Columbia, the signing of the Columbia River Treaty with the US and the creation of the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University, to name just a few of his projects. And when George Massey presented his master plan of constructing a tunnel under the Fraser River, Bennett was intrigued if not skeptical. After nearly four years of lobbying the new Premier, Massey got the news he had been waiting twenty years to hear. Bennett agreed to go ahead with the groundbreaking project and Massey was one of the first people in the province to be told the news.

Construction on the tunnel began in March 1957. Everyone, including Massey and Bennett, knew this was not going to be an easy project to pull off. One of the challenges was the lack of qualified engineering firms in Canada to tackle the job. The Foundation of Canada Engineering Corporation was created to tackle the project and the partner firm was Christiani and Nielsen of Canada.  The next task was to build a dry dock to build the individual tunnel sections. To accomplish this, 2.5 million cubic yards of dirt were moved by dredge machines. Dykes were built to protect the dry dock from the river and dewatering of the area was done in several stages to bring the level of the Fraser down to 30 feet.

Photo Credit: Ted Czolowski, BC Government Photo.

In all six concrete sections, that would make up the underwater portion of tunnel, were created. Each of these six sections measured 344 feet long, 78 feet wide, 24 feet high and weighed 18,500 tons. Each section was then floated down the Fraser and sunk into a dredged trench and held in place by two 80 foot tall towers at either end of the tunnel. These towers also served as the ventilation and pumping stations to keep water out in case of a breech and keep air flowing to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning from vehicle exhaust vapors. Large concrete mats and a layer of crushed stone lie on top of the tunnel to add more weight and help keep it submerged. In all, the tunnel in nearly 5,000 feet long, of which 2,000 feet is underwater. At its lowest point, the tunnel lies 60 feet below the Fraser River, allowing ocean freighters easy access up the river. By car, you know that you are approaching the tunnel from a fair distance off as you will see tall concrete retaining walls approaching from either end and the highway starts dipping slowly down toward the river until you enter the tunnel.

The tunnel was completed in the early spring of 1959 at a cost of $16,600,000 which is just over $30 million in today’s dollars. In all it took over 100,000 cubic yards of concrete to fully construct with 12,000 tons of steel. It was named the Deas Island Tunnel, because it skirted just past the end of Deas Island, which is located in the middle of the Fraser River Estuary. It was considered to be the most state of the art tunnel in North America and only the second pre-fabricated submerged tunnel in the world behind Rotterdam’s Maastunnel. The Deas Island tunnel boasted magnetic traffic detectors along the road surface, loud speakers every 50 feet to relay messages, 14 TV cameras monitoring the traffic flow, emergency phone booths every 177 feet, a
sprinkler system and attendants who worked at either end. During its construction, the Deas Island Tunnel also had one of the best safety records for a major construction project in the province with no deaths and only a few minor injuries that resulted in no lost time. This is stark contrast to the building of the Second Narrow Bridge, also constructed in 1958. The bridge linking Vancouver with North Vancouver had two 70 foot expansion pieces collapse, sending 200 men plunging more than 100 feet into the water below. Twenty-two men died and several dozen were severely injured in the fall. It is, by contrast, considered one of the worst construction accidents in BC at that time.

Photo Credit: Beautiful BC Magazine, 1959.

The first cars passed through the Deas Island Tunnel on May 23, 1959. The Tunnel was official opened by Queen Elizabeth on July 15, 1959 and a per-car toll of twenty-five cents was issued. The tunnel was opened to great fan fare and the man of the hour was George Massey, who saw his twenty year vision become a reality. However, perhaps the years of hard work and the stress of getting to see this day took a toll on Massey. He suffered a massive stroke, just days after the Queen opened the tunnel. Massey spent the next four months in hospital recovering and was eventually well enough to return back to work. Massey ran again in 1960 for the Socreds in Ladner, but was beat out marginally by two NDP candidates. On April 4, 1964, Massey made headlines again when he, in a neatly staged publicity event, became the last driver to pay the toll for the Deas Island Tunnel. The toll had risen to one dollar and the tolls collected had helped re-pay a mass portion of the tunnels construction. Four days later, on April 8, 1964, Massey died at home in Ladner. Almost immediately, the public began to call on the BC government to rename the Deas Island Tunnel in Massey’s honour. On October 27, 1967, WAC Bennett did just that. The tunnel was officially renamed the George Massey Tunnel as a dedication to his tireless efforts to improve traffic flow in and out of Vancouver to Delta and beyond.

The tunnel has changed little over the years. In 1989, counter-flow lanes were introduced to deal with the increased traffic in and out of Vancouver during week days. A seismic upgrade was also conducted in 2006 to make the tunnel better able to withstand an earthquake. Plans in 2006 to widen the tunnel from four lanes to six were subsequently abandoned because the
Province of BC is now considering the construction of a new crossing for the south arm of the Fraser in the next twenty years. It has not been decided, however, if this new crossing will be a bridge or another tunnel.

George Massey’ story is proof that any dream can be realized through hard work, research, networking and the sheer will to get the job done. Thanks to that perseverance, Delta has seen a population boom since the 1960s as has Richmond and south Vancouver. If you would like to read more about the life of George Massey and the building of his tunnel, please check out The Journey & Life of George Massey and Family written by George’s son, Doug Massey, who is a former city councillor with Delta. This book is available at the Delta Museum in Ladner and Albany Books in Tsawwassen.

Photo Credit: Stephen Rees

Industrial History, Political History British Columbia, Fraser River, Geroge Massey, Ladner, Massey Tunnel, Richmond, Social Credit, Vancouver, WAC Bennett