Unfortunately, I’d be really surprised if any of the missing people were found alive.
Body count now up to 13.
Right, because it’s been all Trayvon Martin, all the time. :rolleyes:
True, unless they happened to not be in the area at the time.
Let’s hope they were all visiting friends.
Well, it’s starting to infiltrate their radar - on tonight’s NBC news it was third after the two air crashes.
Can you imagine if it was the other way around? A Canadian crash landing that kills two, and an American rail disaster obliterating a town and killing dozens? From what I saw of CNN over the weekend, it was 24 hour coverage of the SF air crash.
What I heard is that it wasn’t the fire department that shut off the engine but somebody from the RR, not an engineer because something was sparking. The engineer was asleep in the hotel (perfectly normal). I’ve also heard that these were older, more-or-less obsolete, tank cars. The opposition leader, Thomas Mulcair, is claiming that it was due to the government stinting on inspections, but that is his job. Like most accidents, this will turn out to involve many little things, no one fatal, but coming together just wrong.
Apparently most of the missing (and by now certainly presumed dead) were in a nightclub. So the likely death toll will be around 45.
With orphaned children, because there were some young couples there. 
I’ve seen some speculation that some of the people in the night club will never be found - that they were vaporised by the intense heat of the fire and are, just, gone… 
It’s the old news adage: "My next door neighbour dies in a car wreck - it’s a tragedy on the front page.
10,000 people die in a flood on the other side of the world: an inch of space on p. 20."
the train scene was unapproachable for days. the numbers involved still not known. the possible cause(s) far less clear.
{{{Hugs to Quebec. (And, well, everyone, because it’s being kind of a rough month…)}}}
Thank you, Sunspace.
CBC has alive blogfor information. I imagine it’s updated often.
I finally heard from my friends who live in that area, they are shaken up but alive and well.
They live a out of the “affected” area and they were gone camping when it all happened. They got back Monday afternoon, and been returning calls most of the afternoon, on top of finding their friends, so far so good, people close to them are all accounted for but some people they know, without being close to them, are missing, which of course probably means dead
I was seriously freaking out most of the weekend.
tv news said about 1% of the towns population is dead/missing so likely everyone will know of a person killed.
This whole event (and the location where it occurred) sounds like a plotline cooked up by Steven King.
Ex-short-line railroader here. My understanding is that at least one locomotive (of five on the train) was kept running to keep the air brakes charged up; either the engine shut off on its own or a leak developed in the system.
There are definitely some strange things about this event; that there might be a fire (prior to the runaway) on a trainload of flammable materials and that either the railroad management was never informed or never bothered to send someone to inspect the train is decidedly odd.
For another: all freight cars in interchange service have hand brakes, and it would seem prudent (if not expressly written in the operating rules), that a certain number of these (say ten or 15 cars’ worth) would be set when leaving a train unattended. I haven’t seen anything yet in the reporting that suggests that this was done.
The news reports say fairly consistently that the firefighters turned off the engine to stop fuel from getting near the fire they were putting out. There appears to be some disagreement what happened next - some reports say the firefighters waited for a fellow from the railway to come (not the original engineer), but other reports say they left before the railway rep arrived.
I’ve seen some reports that say the original engineer put hand-brakes on before he left for the night, but that they weren’t sufficient by themselves to hold the train in place once the air brakes were turned off.
Two links I posted in the CanaDoper Café that I thought you folks ought to see.
La Presse showing a before and after shot of Lac Mégantic.
And a Huffington Post article saying that Transport Canada says there are no rules against leaving an unlocked, unmanned, running locomotive and its flammable cargo on a main rail line uphill from a populated centre.
Le woah…
Even after I read the number of train cars involved, I still found it hard to understand how ~50 people couldn’t get out - then I saw this video. The size of the fire is immense.
Right now I don’t get the airbrake issue. I thought that loss of air pressure activated the brakes, but apparently the brakes fail off, rather than on, which makes no sense to me.
The MMA chairman blaming the fire department also seems weird. If I put out your train fire and leave it with one of your dudes, that’s job done IMHO. Why didn’t we wake up your engineer to look at the scene? Why didn’t your guy wake your engineer to look at the scene? 