FLIGHT 621: 3000+ Square Foot Colossus replaces Burgsma Home

3000+ Stone Square Brick and Tumbled Foot Colossus sits atop the former Burgsma residence site … 

…where John 'Red' Burgsma and his younger brother watched in horror as the very large, brand-new, state-of-the-art four engined jetliner—an Air Canada 'stretched' DC-8…crashed right before their very eyes, right in their own backyard!

…and in the foreground is the fenced-off area of the soon-to-be official FLIGHT 621 Cemetery and Memorial Gardens.

This 'area' is historical and hallowed grounds. 

It encompasses a sizeable land zone section directly involved in the crash—the impact arena.

And notably, it contains, buried deep down, the topsoil from other parts of the site (moved here specifically by the developers last year) initially discovered by me in 2002, to have been compromised by human remains of Flight 621's victims.

THIS CEMETERY is not a 'play' cemetery… a nice gesture to those 109 passengers and crew who died here; no, this is to be an actual, official, provincially mandated cemetery and future crash memorial that contains buried deep — thousands of fragmented bone remains of those unfortunate 109 souls who died on Air Canada Flight 621, both here, and from the surrounding five acres, on July 5,1970.

Back in 2012, late last year, Barb and I were on-site before the concrete foundation for the 'colossus' had been poured. It had certainly been marked and staked out, at this point. As I looked to the ancient dilapidated bridge for my placement orientation, I was pretty sure we had located and were standing on the old Burgsma house lot.

And then came the miraculous confirmation. As I walked about, there, right THERE, on the very edge of the marked out future colossus foundation…I saw it!

What a find! What a coincidence!

An old piece of white bathroom tile from the former Burgsma home!

And since the Burgsma house was the only house ever within the crash site arena, voila— I had my clearly identifiable confirmation for the former house location!

According to Al Vanderstarren, the old Burgsma house was condemned in the mid-80s, about six months after his family (its' last residents) had moved out. Shortly thereafter the home was demolished, broken up, and plowed down into its' former basement.

Remnants from the house destruction never strayed far from the home's foundation, unlike Flight 621 artifacts that were subjected to a farmer's dragging plow through almost four decades of farming!