Rail crash Quebec town on the road to recovery

Residents arrive for a public vigil at the Presbyteres-Eglises on Friday in Lac-Megantic, Quebec.

Reuters/Lac-Megantic, Quebec

Shell-shocked residents of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, took small steps on a long path back to normalcy on Friday as they returned to homes and businesses just a short walk from the lakeside town’s centre, devastated by a fiery rail crash last week.

The town’s main church, Paroisse de Ste-Agnes, opened its doors to mourners, allowing them to drop off pictures, flowers and notes for the estimated 50 people killed.

A few hundred feet away, investigators continued a round-the-clock search of the fenced-off “red zone” for more bodies and clues to the cause of the crash, while a stream of about 30 social workers walked the streets, offering counselling to those in need.

Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB) said the accident would transform the way the railway industry does business in Canada but the investigations would take months.

The TSB, a federal government agency, is probing the cause of the crash and focusing on the train’s braking systems, the durability of tanker cars and current crew-size requirements. The agency’s findings will result in policy recommendations, TSB investigator Glen Pilon said.

The centre of Lac-Megantic, which is near the Maine border in Quebec’s bucolic Eastern Townships, now resembles a blackened war zone after a train pulling 72 cars of crude oil jumped the track and exploded into flames there last Saturday in what seems to be the worst rail accident in North America in 24 years.

Authorities have recovered 28 bodies so far, eight of which have been identified. Another 22 people are presumed dead.

Emergency crews are also mopping up an oil spill that covers much of the Chaudiere River, a biodiverse waterway that drains into the huge St Lawrence River linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.

Despite progress in returning people to their homes in recent days, the town’s mayor asked out-of-towners not to come into Lac-Megantic on Friday night for a planned candlelight vigil organised on Facebook, saying it would overwhelm the town.

“Our capacity to welcome visitors is really saturated,” Mayor Colette Roy-Laroche said at a press conference. “We are still in an emergency situation.”

All but 200 of the 2,000 or so people initially evacuated have been allowed to go home. But there were signs patience was wearing thin among those with homes that were still off-limits.

One local, Patrice Laframboise, confronted the mayor at the press conference, touching her elbow and demanding to know if it would be a matter of days, weeks, or months before he would be able to see his house again.

“I need to know to get on with my life,” Laframboise said.

Quebec’s environment ministry said that nearly a week after the tragedy, it had contained an oil slick on the Chaudiere River, but warned it would take “weeks to months” to complete the clean-up of the fast-moving waterway.

“There is still a lot of oil that we need to recover, on the banks and near Megantic, so there remains a lot of work to be done,” Michel Rousseau, assistant deputy minister for the environment, said on Thursday.

About 30 to 50% of the surface of the river within 10km of Lac-Megantic is covered in oil, with traces of the slick mess extending much further downstream, where several towns and businesses depend on it for water supply.

Federal investigators have said they are focusing their probe on whether the train’s operator - Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway (MMA)- followed proper safety rules. Police said they have not yet ruled out a crime, possibly criminal negligence.

MMA Chairman Ed Burkhardt visited Lac-Megantic this week and said the train’s engineer may not have set enough hand brakes when he parked the train for the night on July 5 in Nantes, a town 13km up a gentle slope from Lac-Megantic.

Death toll in train disaster rises to 28

The death toll from the Lac-Megantic train disaster rose to 28 on Friday after four more bodies were pulled from rubble of the devastated Canadian town.

A further 22 people remain missing and presumed dead after the rail disaster, Quebec police said, as accident investigators continue to comb through the destruction.

A spokesman from the coroner’s office added they have now identified eight of the 28 bodies, up from just one earlier.

Part of a train made up of 72 tank cars loaded with crude oil derailed in the early hours of Saturday in Lac-Megantic, near the Quebec-Maine border, igniting a huge explosion that laid waste to the center of the lakeside town.

Police working in the disaster zone have had “a great deal of difficulty” because of strong petrol fumes, Quebec provincial police spokesman Michel Forget said.

“These are the places where there is a much denser concentration of oil. So, when we lift pieces, these fumes” reach insupportable limits for the investigators, he explained.

“We have had therefore to review our strategy and deploy to other spots,” Forget explained, emphasising that “the ground is contaminated with oil in some places.”

Police are examining “different measures to ensure ventilation to make sure the work can continue” as efficiently as possible.