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They worked over the weekend, but it was the kind of overtime nobody wants - not even engineering consultants accustomed to pulling long hours mapping out mine sites and building plans.

Instead, the board members and senior staff at A.D. Williams Engineering - the firm that lost three top executives in a plane crash on Friday - gathered at their head office in Edmonton to decide how to stagger on with a third of their leadership team gone.

"There's really been no time to do anything except to process things personally," spokeswoman Sue O'Connor said yesterday.

"They're deciding ... how to move forward."

Already reeling from the loss of two top executives, their task has a terrible element of déjà vu.

Last October, a plane crash killed the company's founder, Allen Williams, and chief financial officer Steven Sutton.

Mr. William's 40-year-old son, Reagan Williams, who took over as company president after his father's death, was piloting the plane that crashed on Friday near the town of Wainwright, Alta.

"It's an extreme impact to lose a leader, really twice here," Brian Pearse, president of the Consulting Engineers of Alberta, said yesterday. "But I think in typical Canadian fashion they will pull together and move on."

Also killed in the crash were Phil Allard, who had replaced Mr. Sutton as CFO, and Rhonda Quirke, director of business integration and strategy. Two men from Edmonton, Trevor John Korol and Shaun Michael Stewart, also died in the crash.

The firm's 150 employees were only beginning to recover from the loss of Allen Williams and Mr. Sutton when the crash occurred, Ms. O'Connor said, adding that grief counsellors will be brought in to help staff.

"Certainly relationships in the workplace are sometimes quite intimate," said Mel Borins, a family doctor who runs grief counselling workshops. "So many losses in one company are just devastating to the people left behind."

Dr. Borins, who has worked with many people grieving the loss of a colleague, says some are left with a sense of guilt, that they survived when another did not.

Others are determined to move on, and keep up the legacy of those who died, he said.

That had certainly been the case for Reagan Williams, who had emulated both his father's business sense and love of flying. In an interview last month with The Edmonton Journal, He described how the company was pressing forward and had plans for expansion, despite its devastating loss. "It's obviously been a big shakeup, but while my dad was still involved in the company, we had a good succession plan."

The company's leadership now has to decide who will take over for Mr. Williams, Ms. O'Connor said.

Other firms have recovered from major tragedies.

Cantor Fitzgerald has risen from the ashes of Sept. 11, 2001, the day 658 of the trading firm's employees died in attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. It has since expanded and has devoted 25 per cent of its profit, for five years, to victims' families.

Earlier this month, A.D. Williams published a special edition of its in-house magazine, paying tribute to the senior Mr. Williams and Mr. Sutton: "Although they will no longer be here to guide us day by day, their legacy is a living, evolving commitment to growth through ethics and excellence."

Over the weekend, the firm placed tributes to three more executives on its website.