Two Locals, Two Countries, One Monument: The Gordie Howe International Bridge
Shortly before noon on Monday July 27, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, behind the wheel of a Michigan-made Ford Mustang convertible, drove across the Gordie Howe International Bridge, officially opening it for passenger traffic. This was the grand opening for the American side of the bridge. The Canadians, joined by Ontario Premier Doug Ford and members of the Howe family (including former Detroit Red Wing and Hockey Hall of Famer Mark Howe), had their own ribbon cutting ceremony the Friday before.
The fact there were two separate ceremonies served as an unfortunate reminder of the tensions between the two countries since the current administration in Washington DC seemingly set its sights on undermining the decades of brotherhood between the two countries. But for the members of Operating Engineers 324 and IUOE Loal 793 in Michigan and Ontario, respectively, the real ceremony had come two full years earlier.
On a bright sunny day in July of 2024, Operating Engineers from both sides met at the middle, high above the Detroit River, to exchange handshakes, souvenirs, and stories.
Local 793 President Dave Turple shook hands with OE324 President Ken Dombrow. OE324 General Foreman Rich “Hutch” Hutchinson shook hands with Local 793 leaders Dave Beaudoin, Kelly Moran, and Local 793 Recording-Corresponding Secretary and Southwestern Ontario Supervisor Steve Booze. Around them were many of the operators who had spent years building toward that spot from opposite sides of an international border.
Local 793 crane operator Jason Henry was among them.
“That was a pretty special moment,” Henry says. “That was pretty cool.”
The moment was ceremonial, but there was nothing symbolic about the work beneath their boots. The two locals had been building the same bridge at the same time, following thousands of drawings, making carefully planned lifts, adjusting to wind and weather, and moving an almost unimaginable amount of earth, steel, concrete and equipment. Then, in the middle of the river, their work—and the workers themselves—met.
“Although construction advanced from opposite sides of the Detroit River, the bridge was always designed as one structure,” says Heather Grondin, Chief Relations Officer for the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority. “Teams in Canada and the US worked closely throughout construction, coordinating engineering, surveying, planning and quality control to ensure the two sides would meet.”
For the members of OE324 and Local 793, that may have been the bridge’s real opening ceremony.
Two years later, the public quickly showed how badly the crossing had been needed. In August, its first full month of operation, 343,507 vehicles crossed the Gordie Howe.
A crossing the region needed
The idea of another Detroit River crossing had been studied for more than a quarter century. Hundreds of millions of dollars in trade move through the area each day. For decades, commercial traffic relied on the privately owned Ambassador Bridge. A better solution was needed.
Canada made the investment that allowed it to happen.
Under the Canada-Michigan Crossing Agreement signed in 2012, Canada assumed responsibility for financing the project, including land acquisition in both countries and the interchange connecting the new crossing to I-75. Tolls collected on the Canadian side help reimburse that investment.
The Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority oversees the project. Bridging North America served as the private-sector partner responsible for delivering the bridge, the ports of entry and the Michigan Interchange, and for operating and maintaining the crossing.
The bridge stretches approximately 1.5 miles or 2.5 kilometers. Its .53 mile (853-meter) main span is the longest of any cable-stayed bridge in North America. The deck crosses the river without a pier in the water, while two 722-foot towers rise above the shorelines.
And the bridge was only one of the project’s four main components.
Together, the Canadian and U.S. ports of entry occupy nearly 300 acres. The Michigan Interchange rebuilt approximately 1.8 miles of I-75 and connected the American port directly to the freeway through new ramps, reconfigured local streets and new road, pedestrian and rail bridges.
The scale can be measured in miles, acres, tons and billions of dollars…and working man-hours.
Starting from the ground
Kecia Harper remembers when the U.S. Port of Entry was just fields.
Harper arrived in August 2019 as the 14th BNA hire on the American side. She began in an excavator and loader, clearing ground and helping prepare the future site for construction. There were no inspection buildings, organized supply yards or finished ramps leading toward the river. There was ground to prepare and an enormous project still contained mostly in plans.
Materials soon began arriving faster than the young site was prepared to handle them. Harper saw trucks being unloaded and supplies being left wherever space could be found. She began sorting the material, receiving deliveries and arranging the yard so crews could find what they needed. A superintendent saw what she was doing and asked her to take responsibility for the yard. Before long, the excavator operator had become a foreman.
The yard became a circulation system for the project. Steel and H-pile came through. Harnesses, rigging, tools and safety equipment. Deliveries had to be directed toward the POE, I-75 work, or bridge-deck yard. If the wrong material landed in the wrong place the delay could be costly. It was essential materials got to the right location.
Harper kept it moving. She also helped give workers a stronger voice in how the work was done.
WDBA established a worker safety team with representatives from the trades, recognizable by their blue hard hats. Harper served on the team and later helped lead it. Its role was not to discipline workers, but to give them a direct and protected way to identify what they needed to do their jobs safely.
“This wasn’t me being safety,” Harper says. “This was me being out there making sure that the guys and girls in the union were able to get what they needed to get the job done.”
If a crew needed the correct straps, harnesses, screens or other equipment, Harper could document the concern without placing an individual worker in the middle of it. Team members walked the site and asked questions. When some workers initially mistook the blue hard hats for management, Harper explained the difference: “No, we’re not part of safety. We’re here for your safety.”
Her role grew again when apprentices came into the yard. Harper taught them to operate forklifts, unload trucks and arrange material safely and efficiently. The project gave women opportunities not only to operate equipment, but to take on visible leadership roles, and Harper was there near the beginning as an operator, foreman, mentor and worker-safety representative.
Her view of that responsibility is simple.
“You’re only as good as the people who come up behind you,” Harper says.
That idea ran through the entire project. The bridge was not just being built by experienced hands. It was creating the next group of experienced hands.
Two apprentices on opposite banks
Alan Sutton and Julian Hewitt-Ferrell began on different sides of the river and in different IUOE locals, but their stories followed remarkably similar lines.
Detroit-native Sutton arrived on the Michigan side in January 2020, two and a half years into his OE324 apprenticeship. Hewitt-Ferrell, from Chatham, Ontario, came to the Canadian side as a first-year Local 793 crane apprentice. Both began as oilers. Both learned by maintaining cranes, preparing equipment and paying attention to the journey-level operators around them. Both watched the towers rise from near their foundations. And both became journey-level crane operators while still working on the same project where they had started as apprentices.
Sutton remembers grass, overgrowth, a concrete plant, a few storage containers and temporary roads. The caissons and foundations were underway, but most of the future bridge had to be imagined. He oiled on cranes, picked up experience on civil equipment and learned how experienced operators approached work where complacency could have serious consequences.
Eventually he moved into the seat himself. When Sutton took over a Broderson IC-200 crane, it had approximately 600 hours on it. Now it’s approaching 8,000.
“Just by thinking about it, it makes me smile,” Sutton says. “I worked my way through my apprenticeship, and I was able to become a full-fledged crane operator with my own crane now. It’s been a journey.”
The hours tell only part of it. Sutton helped with concrete pours, bridge lighting, cable-stay work and the towers. In a small detail that captures how completely his career became woven into the project, he says he was fortunate enough to install the first fencing on the bridge—and the last.
The steady work changed his life away from the site, too.
“It’s meant a lot to me because I’ve been able to live the American dream,” Sutton says. “I’ve accomplished a lot of things in my personal life because I’ve been able to have steady work and come to this job.”
Across the river, Hewitt-Ferrell arrived as the first two tower legs were coming out of the ground. Pile driving had begun, and 24-hour concrete pours formed the enormous bases.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better place to start, from the ground up,” Hewitt-Ferrell says. “See where tower legs start to where they end. It’s a blessing to be able to see the process.”
He started by making sure the equipment was ready and learning to be where the crew needed him before anyone had to ask. He later moved into the seat of a Grove 8100, a 100-ton rough-terrain crane, helped erect and dismantle the tower crane, and completed his apprenticeship in November 2022.
Like Sutton, he received an education no classroom could reproduce. He saw how decisions made days or weeks earlier by companies and engineers eventually reached an operator at ground level. He learned that plans change, coordination matters and an operator has to be ready to adjust.
“Every day was new and you needed to be adaptable,” Hewitt-Ferrell says. “Be ready, and be there when they need you.”
Hewitt-Ferrell walked the bridge with his mother on the first day the multi-use public path opened, explaining the work and showing her where he had been. A few days later, he crossed with his father. Sutton had driven equipment onto the deck hundreds of times, but looks forward to the different feeling of crossing in his own vehicle.
On one side of the border, a Local 793 apprentice had become an operator. On the other, an OE324 apprentice had done the same. The bridge gave both of them years to learn, improve and understand a massive project from the ground to its final details.
John Haberkorn understood the value of that opportunity before he experienced the project himself.
Haberkorn was OE324’s lead crane instructor and later its Apprenticeship Coordinator when bridge construction began. He spoke with BNA and its subcontractors about bringing apprentices onto the project and exposing them to the range of work. Contractors naturally wanted to hold on to apprentices who became valuable members of their crews, allowing some to remain for years.
“Some apprentices were out there a very, very long time,” Haberkorn says, “like basically ‘ink wet on the paperwork to graduation certificate’, and now they’re journey people with years under their belt.”
Haberkorn later left the Training Center and returned to the field. His own path eventually carried him to the bridge, where he operated cranes in the yards, helped with rigging and lift plans, filled in on several machines and worked alongside people he had helped train or place.
“It means the world,” Haberkorn says. “Their lives are changed. They have a path and a career when they came to us with a hope and a dream.”
Hutchinson saw the same transformation from the field. Sutton had been his oiler when they arrived. Years later, Hutch watched him operate his own crane. Construction usually moves workers from one short assignment to the next. Having enough time on one job to watch an apprentice develop into a confident operator is rare. On the Gordie Howe, it happened more than once.
Placing 100,000 pounds like fine china
Official project materials estimated that construction would create 2,500 jobs. Those jobs extended across the trades and across the border. Ironworkers assembled steel. Carpenters built forms. Laborers, electricians, pipefitters, teamsters and others worked through every component. At nearly every stage, however, the work depended on an Operating Engineer getting the right people, equipment and material into the right place.
At one point in early 2024, Hutchinson had 57 OE324 operators working on the main span, approach, tower and deck, including ten apprentices. Local 793 reported between 50 and 65 members working each day on different parts of the Canadian side, with hundreds contributing over the life of the project.
“The Gordie Howe International Bridge required a highly trained workforce capable of performing complex work in a challenging construction environment,” BNA says. “Union Operating Engineers brought extensive training, certifications and a strong commitment to safe work practices that helped meet the project’s demanding standards. Foremen, operators and apprentices all played a role in identifying hazards, participating in daily safety discussions and mentoring newer workers. That shared accountability helped create a strong safety culture and contributed to the successful delivery of the project.”
Their machines ranged from forklifts and compact cranes to tower cranes and massive crawlers. Operators unloaded the pieces, assembled the cranes that would build the bridge, moved those cranes as construction advanced, managed materials through multiple laydown yards and lifted many components several times before they reached their final position.
“It was the whole spectrum,” Haberkorn says, from unloading trucks and simple rigging to “setting a 150-ton girder with two cranes with basically millimeters of clearance.”
The visible movement of the crane was the end of a much longer process. Lift plans accounted for the weight and shape of the load, rigging, boom configuration, radius, ground or deck capacity, clearances, weather and the crane’s chart. Multi-crane picks required the equipment and crews to move together. Work over the river added marine traffic, wind and an active navigation channel. Work above I-75 had to fit within tightly controlled closures so the freeway could reopen safely.
Haberkorn remembers the contrast between the tremendous size of the material and the delicacy required at the end of a lift.
“And when we started setting the back span, or when we were filling in for Aaron Payne or Tim Struthers, you don’t realize the mass and the scope of what we were doing, because you’d take something that was 100,000 pounds, take it up 150 feet, and then place it like fine china,” he says. “I mean, it was just utterly mind blowing, and to have that opportunity and to perform that successfully was just amazing.
On the Canadian side, Henry spent much of five and a half years in a Liebherr LR 1300.1 SX crawler crane. By his estimate, he handled 80 to 85 percent of the structural steel that moved from the river work through the Canadian approach span. Some of the initial tandem lifts remain among his clearest memories.
“Not every day you lift hundreds of thousands of pounds in the air with two crawler cranes,” Henry says. “Making sure that we do it right, do it safely—that was the biggest challenge.”
Beaudoin came to the project as an operator when only a handful of Operating Engineers were on the Canadian site. He had worked in wind-turbine construction throughout Canada, completed his Local 793 mobile-crane apprenticeship and deliberately placed himself on the out-of-work list because he wanted a chance at the bridge.
He ran a 300-ton crawler, handled much of the land-side steel erection and lifted steel to the deck for work over the water. He also entered a separate tower-crane apprenticeship, joined the crew that took the Canadian tower crane from approximately 500 feet to its full 722 feet, and helped bring it down again. As the workforce grew, Beaudoin became main-span foreman and later crane and equipment supervisor, coordinating operators, equipment and schedule.
The hours reflected the responsibility. Beaudoin estimates that he averaged 80 hours a week for two years during work on the side and main spans.
“So many moving parts. So many different things. Everything so heavy,” he says. “I welcomed the challenge.”
Skill and preparation also mattered away from the planned lifts. In November 2023, OE324 members Mike Isble and Dan Dombrow were operating a support boat near the U.S. side when another boat capsized in rough, cold water. They responded within seconds and pulled four anglers from the Detroit River. The U.S. Coast Guard later honored them with its Captain David P. Dobbins Award for excellence in search and rescue.
On a project filled with enormous numbers, safety still came down to individual people making the right decision at the right time.
The road to the bridge
The towers and stay cables naturally draw the eye. Dale Taylor knows how easily that can make the rest of the project disappear. Taylor came to the I-75 side in March 2024. He spent long days on a sweeper—often 13 hours a day, six days a week and sometimes seven—before moving to a lowboy. In August 2025, he became steward for the group.
The work around him included the new port ramps, interchanges, service drives and local streets; water and sewer work; and bridges at Livernois, Clark, Green and Springwells. As construction finished, the job turned toward restoration, removal of laydown yards and all the details needed to return surrounding areas to permanent use.
“Even in comparison, as big as the bridge is, it was still a massive project on this side,” Taylor says.
Harper puts it another way: “We think of the bridge, but we don’t think about all the work that the I-75 did.”
The pieces were inseparable. The new ramps had to carry passenger and commercial vehicles between the U.S. port and I-75. And at the same time, the project rebuilt local connections across the freeway, including five pedestrian bridges aligned with nearby trails.
Vinnie Palazzolo spent more than six years working through the I-75 corridor, U.S. port and, when needed, the bridge itself. The freeway remained active through much of the job, which meant traffic control, narrow working areas and carefully scheduled closures.
During those closures, Palazzolo operated smaller cranes around much larger crawlers setting 130,000-pound beams. Once two beams were in place, he and other operators set the diaphragms and crossmembers that tied the structure together and kept it stable. The large cranes had to hold while the smaller cranes worked between them. Crews ran 12-hour shifts until the structure reached the point where the cranes could safely release it and the freeway could reopen.
The job also offered Taylor something construction work often does not: years of major work close enough to home that he could sleep in his own bed. For an operator accustomed to traveling, a drive of a little more than an hour felt short. The union wages, pension, defined contribution plan and health care made the work a career; the long project allowed him to build that career without leaving his family for weeks at a time.
His approach to serving as steward is just as collective.
“It’s not so much what a steward does; it’s what the whole collective does,” Taylor says.
Palazzolo feels the same possibility in the Union itself.
“Getting into 324 for me—it couldn’t have happened at a better time,” he says. “In my mind, it’s the key to the city. We’ve got golden opportunities in this union to do well and make good livings.”
The bridge provided those opportunities at a scale few projects ever can.
What the project leaves behind
The most obvious legacy is the completed crossing. It provides six lanes of traffic, modern inspection facilities, room for future border-processing capacity and a direct connection between Highway 401 and I-75. Its bike and walking path connects to trail networks on both sides of the river.
The project was also designed to leave benefits closer to the ground.
For Operating Engineers, the workforce legacy can be read in Sutton and Hewitt-Ferrell, who entered as apprentices and left as experienced crane operators. It is present in the apprentices Harper mentored, and in the members Haberkorn helped place before returning to the field to work beside them. It is present in the workers who learned one machine, then another, and who will carry experience from an international megaproject to every job that follows.
It can also be measured in years of paychecks, health-care hours, and pension contributions. Those benefits allowed members to buy houses, raise families and build more stable lives.
For Beaudoin, those years changed nearly everything around the work. During the project, he bought a home, got married and had two children. Three of his grandparents were alive when the job began, and they followed its progress with pride. His parents, wife and children can now see the result as part of their own landscape.
“I live way out in the county, but I can see the span from a backyard gap in the trees,” Beaudoin says. “I can look out on a clear day and see what I was part of.”
On opening day, he was just getting home from work when his parents arrived, gathered the children and took the family across the new bridge for dinner.
“It’s tough to realize when you’re doing it every day, but you see their perspective, and see their awe,” he says. “It’s been really, really good.”
For all the project’s extraordinary engineering, moments like that may be its clearest measure. The bridge entered the lives of the people who built it, and then became something they could share with the people for whom they had been working all along.
Every person interviewed had a list of names of people they worked side by side with and wanted to call out. Tom Kipen, Steve Kruithoff, Steve Struthers, Mike Cody, Brett Nelson, Brianne Casto, Bill Rinaldi…the names go on and on. This was a project that touched hundreds of hands.
One career ending and another beginning
For Hutch, the Gordie Howe International Bridge became the final project in a 47-year career.
He arrived in early 2020 while crews were completing drilled-shaft caissons. He began unloading equipment and assembling cranes, then became the Operating Engineer general foreman and helped plan equipment needs, crane capacities, heavy lifts and the sequence of work across the project. On a job this large, that meant understanding how the tower, structural steel, stay cables, paving, yards and support work affected one another—and making sure qualified people and the right machines were ready when each phase arrived.
Hutch is a third-generation Operating Engineer. His grandfather and father had both been crane operators. His parents and grandparents moved from Canada to Michigan in 1965, giving his work on an international bridge a family connection that he had not expected when he entered the trade as an oiler in 1978.
Across his career, he worked on the Chrysler Technical Center, Blue Water Bridge, Comerica Park, Little Caesars Arena, the Hudson’s site and dozens of parking structures. Each time, another landmark felt like it might be the largest or most memorable project he would see. The Gordie Howe became the one on which he finished.
Hutch retired from the bridge in September 2025. “After 47 years, it was about time to hang it up,” he says.
Before the public opening, after the concrete deck had cured, Hutch and an ironworker colleague quietly drove across, bought coffee at Tim Hortons and came back. Now, he plans with his wife and make a day of it in Canada. That trip would be different. It would be less about checking the work and more about looking back at it.
“When you start a project and you stand there in an open field and look across and you try to imagine what it’s going to look like,” Hutch says, “every day you drive home, you look in the rearview mirror and you see a little bit new, a little bit more, a little higher, a little bit longer, more cranes, more people, and then to finally see it come to fruition—it’s amazing.”
On the Canadian side, Jason Henry represents the beginning of a different family story.
Henry is the first Operating Engineer in his family. He entered Local 793 after working as a mechanic for equipment-rental companies and completed his crane apprenticeship in 2013. The Gordie Howe was the largest and longest project of his career, close to his home near Windsor and filled with the kind of crane work that had fascinated him since childhood.
Then the project gave him an opportunity he had not expected.
Henry encouraged his son, Mitchell, to join Local 793. Mitchell began on the dirt side, joined the bridge project and, after some encouragement from seasoned operators who reinforced his father’s advice, entered a crane apprenticeship. Eventually, he became his father’s apprentice.
“It was an opportunity to work with my boy,” Henry says. “He was my apprentice. So it was a cool father-son year.”
The same project that completed Hutch’s career helped Mitchell begin his own. One third-generation Operating Engineer, whose family came from Canada, retired after helping build a new connection to it. Across the river, a first-generation Operating Engineer welcomed the second generation of his family into the trade.
Henry says he knew how rare the experience was even while he was living it.
“I just can’t say enough of how it was such a special project, and how fortunate I was to get on that job,” he says. “There were days that I thought, man, I can’t believe I am so happy to get up and go to work. I looked forward to going to work there.”
One man’s last job became another family’s first. The bridge connected two countries, and the work itself connected dozens of Operating Engineers. And that is something no amount of politics can ever change.
A special thank you to all of the Operating Engineers on both sides who shared their photographs and experiences for this story, as well as IUOE Local 793 and the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority (WDBA).
