Heather Richer prepares tables for patrons at her restaurant Mum's Place in Elliot Lake, Ont. Her restaurant was originally located in the Algo Centre Mall when it collapsed in 2012.Photography by Cory Wright/The Globe and Mail
The worst moment of Heather Richer’s life has dragged on now for 13 years, nine months and 18 days.
Even today, the memories well up without warning. Certain loud noises, the sound of running water, the sight of rooftop parking – they can all bring her back to June 23, 2012, when it felt like the whole world was falling down around Mum’s Place, her bustling diner in the Algo Centre Mall, once the social and commercial hub of Elliot Lake, Ont.
“I saw it all happen,” she says, her hand beginning to shake at the mere thought of the mall collapse that killed two women. “I saw the whole parking lot coming down, the cars, and those two ladies, I saw them go down. Maybe if I wouldn’t have seen that it wouldn’t have affected me as much.”
On Friday, she and dozens of other survivors earned a bittersweet victory when a Toronto judge agreed to endorse a $10-million settlement in a class-action lawsuit filed shortly after the collapse.
A group of nine defendants will contribute toward the total, with the City of Elliot Lake paying $3.248-million, developer Algoma Central Properties paying $1.856-million and property owner Eastwood Mall Inc. contributing $1.619-million. None of the parties are acknowledging liability.
“The hope is that in class-actions and litigation, that if there’s compensation, that that is at least some solace,” said David O’Connor, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, who said that the complexities of dealing with more than a dozen defendants prolonged the case.
An aerial view of Elliot Lake's city centre with the site of the old Algo Centre Mall an empty lot almost 14 years after the collapse.
The bulk of the money, about $6-million, will compensate those injured at the mall, along with anyone who lost businesses or income. The rest will go toward legal fees, administration, disbursements and other expenses.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs are anticipating up to 300 claims for compensation.
A proposed distribution plan provides as little as $750 for minor abrasions or psychiatric injuries – including resolved anxiety, nightmares and emotional distress – and up to $60,000 for major orthopedic and musculoskeletal injuries or chronic psychiatric disorders.
Lawsuits brought by the families of the two women who died were settled previously.
Scenes from the Elliot Lake mall collapse
For the survivors, the settlement is both welcome acknowledgment and a painful reminder of everything they lost with the mall.
“Nobody is going to end up with much,” said Ms. Richer. “And to be honest, I don’t really care as long as somebody is held accountable for that mall, and that still hasn’t happened.”
Completed in 1980, the mall roof leaked from the day it opened. The builders experimented with an unproven waterproofing system on the rooftop parking deck that allowed water and road salt to infiltrate the building’s steel support beams for more than three decades.
The Zellers store set up buckets to catch the constant drips. The library had to cover rows of books in blue tarps.
In later years, severe corrosion set in, catching the notice of Luc Cyr, who managed the mall’s Foodland grocery store.
“For years prior I had been contacting the Ministry of Labour of serious concerns with the building,” he said. “Nobody really took anything seriously.”
Still, it was the imperfect heart of a Northern Ontario mining town that was once called the uranium capital of the world and inspired both a Stompin’ Tom Connors song and the most poignant scenes in Alistair MacLeod’s classic novel No Great Mischief.
Elliot Lake mall was 'huge hub,' collapse a blow to local economy
When the last of the mines closed in the 1990s, the city reinvented itself as a retirement community. By 2007, Statistics Canada found that it was tied with Parksville, B.C., as Canada’s most elderly city.
“On the weeks the pension cheques arrived, the mall was crowded,” Ms. Richer said. “Luckily it was an off week that day and the place was pretty slow, otherwise there’d have been a whole lot more casualties.”
At 2:18 p.m., she was cleaning tables, getting ready to close up Mum’s Place, when the roof caved in with a roar. The collapse sent car-sized rubble and a Ford Escape crashing onto a lottery kiosk where Lucie Aylwin, 37, worked. She and one of the kiosk’s frequent visitors, 74-year-old Doloris Perizzolo, would both be found dead in the days that followed.
A memorial in Elliot Lake for Lucie Aylwin and Doloris Perizzolo, who lost their lives in the 2012 mall collapse.
The Bargain Shop manager Adam Amyotte was leaving the store to make a bank deposit when a piece of the roof fell a few metres from him. He ran back to the store to make sure the customers could get out. “One old lady was asking me if she could still buy a pair of shoes. I said ‘just take them,’” he recalls. “By then I could look up through the roof and see daylight. I knew we weren’t coming back.”
At one point he saw a child and mother at the edge of the hole peering in and yelled at them to get back. From that day on, he’s had a recurring nightmare of going to the same edge himself and hearing someone yelling for help.
Ms. Richer at Mum’s Place and Mr. Cyr at Foodland also ushered customers out, even as the place filled with ankle-deep water from broken water lines.
Once outside, they could barely process what they’d been through. When Ms. Richer’s 16-year-old-daughter couldn’t reach her mom by phone, she sprinted to the mall to find her, not even stopping to put on shoes.
The days after were a blur for all of them. Ms. Richer stood among a throng of residents outside the mall day and night, watching as search-and-rescue teams started, then stopped, then restarted their search for the two victims.
Mr. Amyotte says his employee benefits were cut immediately and calls the next few years “a living hell” as he tried and failed to get employment. He and his partner lost their home and ended up moving away to Cochrane, Ont., then Saskatchewan, then Nunavut, all the while plagued by the nightmare of standing at the edge. “We were just trying to catch up financially that whole time, make up the loss,” he said.
Mr. Cyr went a different direction. He says he was so disappointed watching officials shirk responsibility during a public inquiry into the collapse that he successfully ran for council, where he spearheaded a campaign to buy the former mall property. He declined to run again in 2022, but says he plans to try again this coming fall.
“Today, to me, it’s a bit of comfort,” he said of the settlement. “But it’s not closure. That will only come if the people responsible for the neglect and incompetence are held responsible.”
Ms. Richer feels much the same. She developed PTSD after the collapse and held off opening a new restaurant for around a year despite encouragement from friends and former diners. “I was afraid,” she explains. “It felt like no place in town was safe.”
Eventually she opened a second Mum’s Place about a three-minute walk from the barren patch of ground where the mall once sat. For more than a decade, she’s been topping up coffee mugs, delivering heaping plates of eggs and selling out of the locally famous spaghetti bolognese.
But at age 63, she’s just decided to put the diner up for sale. Her daughter, the one who sprinted to the mall site, is now a 28-year-old physician-assistant in the Sudbury area. She’s preparing to get married in June. Ms. Richer and her husband have plans to move a couple hours down the highway to join them. That, she said, more than any court settlement, would bring closure.