At WestCal, we’re decidedly pro-pipeline. We’ve discussed this issue before, but for anyone who’s new to our blog, here’s the Coles Notes version. Protesting pipelines doesn’t prevent oil from being transferred out of Alberta to the other provinces. It just means the oil is transported by train or truck instead. Now we’ll be the first to admit that pipelines have their flaws. When they fail, the oil spills can be large (though they aren’t usually) and some environmental damage is inevitable. Trucks are an option, but they have a very high incident of accidents, because vehicle collisions are very common. But when spills on trains happen, their impact is far larger than a typical pipeline spill, and people can get hurt or killed. You only have to look as far the Lac-Mégantic disaster in Quebec to see just how tragic a train accident can be.
Very early on July 6th 2013, an unattended, 74-car freight train began to roll. Within the tankers, the train carried highly volatile crude oil, and with no one watching, it rolled faster and faster until it broke free of the rails in the downtown of a small Quebec town. The train exploded with a blast radius of a full kilometre. Lac-Mégantic was turned from sleepy town to inferno, and half the downtown area was destroyed in the blast. The smoke and clouds glowed with sparks and flames, so that the sky was yellow and orange. It was as if the entire horizon had been swallowed by flames. The heat of the blaze could be felt over 2 kilometres away.
Forty-seven people lost their lives.
After the fires were put out, the rest of the downtown area, save only 3 buildings, had to be demolished due to petroleum contamination. It was only the fourth-deadliest rail accident in Canadian history.
Even as they rebuilt, the people of Lac-Mégantic wanted answers. How did this happen? They weren’t the only ones.
In October 2012, eight months before the derailment, the lead locomotive of this train was sent for repairs. The engine had failed, but time and money crunch meant it had to get back into commission as quickly as possible. A patch job was completed instead of a standard repair. When it failed, oil began to accumulate in the body of the locomotive. In just over half a year, the collected oil would become overheated and catch fire.
The evening before the disaster, the crew brought the train to a stop 11 kilometres west of Lac-Mégantic. Typically, trains are parked off the main line, but tonight the adjacent siding was being used to store empty boxcars. There is no rule against parking trains on the main line, so that’s where engineer, Tom Harding, parked the train. A parked train will have one locomotive left on to control the air brakes.
However, it is regulation that trains have enough hand brakes applied to prevent the train from moving even without the air brakes. After the hand brakes are applied, the train must be tested to show it will not move. But the air brakes were incorrectly left on during the test that night, so the train passed despite the engineer having set handbrakes on just the 5 locomotive engines and 2 additional cars. During that day, Harding had noted the damaged locomotive was spewing too much black and white smoke. Despite that, he chose the damaged locomotive to be the one left on to control the air brakes. As Harding took a taxi to his hotel that night, he told his taxi driver that, “He felt unsafe leaving a locomotive running while it was spitting oil and thick, black smoke.”
The smoke flooded the area, and it took under two hours for the Fire Department and Police to arrive due to a 911 call. As protocol dictates, they turned off the broken locomotive to prevent fuel circulating into the fire. The fire department then extinguished the blaze. Instead of calling the engineer back, the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway (MMA) traffic controller, Richard Labrie sent their own employees who confirmed to the police that the train was safe despite not being familiar with air brakes. Not long afterwards, the broken locomotive shut down and the air brakes became disabled. The insufficient hand brakes did little as the train began to roll down the hill towards the town far below. The long downhill slope meant the train entered Lac-Mégantic at over 100 km/h — more than triple the typical speed for that area, as there is a curve in the rail. It didn’t make the curve.
Afterwards, locomotive engineer Tom Harding, rail traffic controller Richard Labrie, operations manager Jean Demaître, and the MMA were each charged with 47 counts of criminal negligence causing death and faced a sentence of life imprisonment if convicted. After 9 days of deliberation, the jurors acquitted all three men on January 19th 2018. The MMA will be the next to defend itself against charges of criminal negligence causing death.
