Seven years ago, Shadrach "Shad" Horde had a choice -- enjoy a cruise with his wife, daughter and son-in-law, or take a midnight tour of BART's transbay tube.
It wasn't a tough call. Horde went tubing.
"He wasn't missing that for anything," his daughter Shawna Anderson said. "He'd been on many cruises with us."
Horde, who died in Santa Rosa on Oct. 30 from complications related to leukemia, had a personal interest in the transbay tube. From 1966-69, he poured all the concrete inside the 58 sections that, at the time, comprised the longest and deepest undercrossing in the world.
When the project was complete, Horde and his boss Don Hughes posed for an iconic photograph inside the tube -- seated at a small table with a checkered tablecloth, raising a champagne toast to BART's handiwork.
Horde enjoyed a varied and in some ways extraordinary career in the construction business. A member of multiple unions, he worked on the Geneva Towers, the Alcoa Building and a retrofit of Candlestick Park in San Francisco. The Texas native also worked on several projects in Santa Rosa, where he lived the final 40 years of his life.
"He liked going to the Santa Rosa mall to people-watch," Anderson said. "He would talk about how he did the railings in the mall."
"Great guy," said Bob Urge, who worked with Horde on the Richardson Bay Bridge. "Everybody loved him. He was always happy."
enjoyed reminiscing about his work on the transbay tube, hence his excitement upon receiving BART's invitation in June 2004 to explore the tube 35 years after the final section was lowered into place.
With BART officials and media representatives, Horde returned to the tube for the first time since he had worked inside it. A diesel train took the group through the 3.8-mile passage.
"It's amazing it's been 30 years since I worked down here," Horde said at the time. "It was put together real good."
In fact, it was a civil engineering marvel.
"It was a very big deal in its day," BART engineer Steve Kappler said, "and it still is."
Before the tube was constructed, Kappler said, a trench 60 feet wide and 70 to 100 feet deep was dredged in the floor of the bay. Two feet of rock was then applied to form a stable bed.
Then it was time to outfit the tube's sections, which varied in length from 315 to 350 feet. One by one, they were floated offshore to an outfitting dock, where the reinforced concrete was applied. Once the concrete was in place, the 12,000-ton section was lowered into its spot in the trench.
When the sections were assembled and watertight, a secondary placement of concrete took place. For Horde, that meant being driven into the tube, where he would spend his day working in a dank tunnel beneath water as deep as 200 feet.
"This guy sounds like quite a guy," Kappler said. "If he worked on the tube, those were real men, I'll tell you that."
Horde didn't shrink from a challenge.
"He liked heights," Anderson said of her father. "We have pictures of him on the Geneva Towers, up pretty high. He didn't even have a (safety) strap on. He has his foot right on the edge."
Away from the job, Horde, who served six years in the Marines, was firm but loving according to his daughter.
"We called him Sarge," Anderson said. "He was loving and kind, but he meant business. You did what he said."
He liked the outdoors, especially gardening and hunting. He bagged his limit of seven ducks three days before he died.
"He always got a limit," Urge said.
In addition to Anderson, Horde is survived by his wife Gwen Horde and daughter Tori Horde-Abraham.
"Strangers come up to me and tell me what a great person and a special dad I have," Anderson said. "Everybody loves my dad."
Contact Gary Peterson at 925-952-5053. Follow him at Twitter.com/garyscribe.
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