As two more bodies were found in the ashes Tuesday, Canadian police
said they had begun a criminal investigation into the runaway oil
train that incinerated the heart of a close-knit town near the Maine
border.
The death toll in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, rose to 15, with at least 37
residents unaccounted for and feared dead. The coroner's office said
some may have been vaporized by the early Saturday inferno that
erupted when at least five of 72 tank cars full of North Dakota shale
oil exploded after the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway train rolled
6 miles downhill and derailed about 1:15 a.m.
Quebec Provincial Police Inspector Michel Forget said criminal
negligence was one possible charge being considered, the CBC reported.
Terrorism has been ruled out.
The locomotive's data-recording "black box" has been recovered.
The head of the rail company has accused local firefighters of
disabling the train's air brakes while fighting a small fire aboard
one locomotive about an hour before the catastrophe. But the fire
chief of nearby Nantes denied that his crews had acted improperly,
saying that they had followed railway policy and that rail personnel
were notified after the engine blaze was extinguished.
STORY: Brakes had been disabled in fatal oil train crash
Edward Burkhardt, president and CEO of the railway's parent company,
Rail World, arrived from Chicago on Tuesday evening. He told reporters
that "a combination of factors," including the lack of an on-site
engineer, were responsible for the accident, The Montreal Gazette
reported. He said the rail company could not assume the entire cost of
the disaster.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada confirmed during a news
briefing that a railway employee was present during the locomotive
blaze, which was reported just before midnight Friday. It's not yet
clear whether the employee, who was not the engineer but had parked
the train for the night, had checked the braking system after
firefighters left.
Nantes Fire Chief Patrick Lambert said it took 45 minutes to put out the fire.
"The people from MMA told us, 'That's great — the train is secure,
there's no more fire, there's nothing anymore, there's no more
danger,'" he said. "We were given our leave, and we left."
The five-engine train was on the main track and not a rail siding as
reported initially, one safety board official said Tuesday. The slope
was 1.2%, which is considered steep by railroad standards.
A rail yard neighbor reported hearing and seeing the train roll away
about five minutes after firefighters left. Rail dispatchers were
unaware of the runaway train because the track, a secondary line, has
no warning or monitoring systems.
The lead safety board investigator, Donald Ross, said the train began
rolling toward Lac-Megantic about 12:56 a.m. Saturday. Less than 20
minutes and 6 miles later, it jumped the tracked traveling 63 mph and
exploded. The inferno could be seen from space.
The fire destroyed about 30 buildings, including the popular
Musi-Cafe, which was packed as usual on a Saturday night. About a
third of the town's 6,000 residents had to flee, with 1,200 returning
Tuesday.
Resident Gilles Fluet told the Associated Press that the train "was
moving at a hellish speed. No lights, no signals, nothing at all.
There was no warning. It was a black blob that came out of nowhere."
He had just said goodbye to friends at the Musi-Cafe and left. "A
half-minute later, and I wouldn't be talking to you right now," he
said.
"There are those who ran fast and those who made the right decision.
Those who fooled around trying to start their cars to leave the area,
there are probably some who burned in them," Fluet told AP. "And some
who weren't fast enough to escape the river of fire that ran down to
the lake, they were roasted."
About 200 officers have been slowly searching for bodies or remains in
the "red zone" around the derailment. Bodies that have been recovered
were burned beyond recognition, and medical examiners are using DNA
samples provided by families to try to identify the victims.
The Quebec coroner's office said that none of the bodies recovered so
far can be identified as male or female, and that identifying all the
remains could take years, if ever, the Gazette reported.
The disaster has focused attention on MMA's accident record and raised
questions about the safety of transporting oil by rail instead of
pipeline. Ross noted that the tank cars were generic DOT-111 models
and not double-hulled or reinforced. Flaws in the tankers have been
noted as far back as 1991.
In March 2012, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has
issued safety guidelines on the DOT-111s, including a recommendation
that all tank cars used to carry ethanol and crude oil be reinforced
to make them more resistant to punctures in derailments. But the
Department of Transportation has not implemented the guidelines, which
the rail industry opposes as too costly — perhaps $1 billion.
U.S. Federal Railroad Administration records show that before the
Lac-Megantic accident, MMA had 34 derailments since 2003, five
resulting in damage of more than $100,000.
Burkhardt called those figures misleading.
"This is the only significant mainline derailment this company has had
in the last 10 years. We've had, like most railroads, a number of
smallish incidents, usually involving accidents in yard trackage and
industry trackage," he told the CBC.
0 comments:
Post a Comment