MoodIndigo1, I’m very glad to hear your family members are safe.
Yeah, I got the “fuckin’ hell” pretty good.
I am also very glad that you and your family are all okay, MoodIndigo. I was watching the news story of the CEO of the train company, MMA, showing up in Mégantic yesterday - that did NOT go well. I got the impression that the CEO didn’t think it was all that bad, and was unprepared for the level of hostility he encountered (just a typical out-of-touch CEO? I dunno).
ETA: I’m watching cars driving around by some train cars, and I want to yell at them, “Drive away! Drive away from the trains!”
There is nothing a CEO in these circumstances can do or say.
At one point it seemed like he was blaming everything on the firemen who put out the original fire - that didn’t seem like a good thing for him to say AT ALL.
Yeah, and he also seems to have singled out the train engineer for blame, after saying (from Illinois) that procedures had been followed. That didn’t go over well either. He should have blamed others less, and simply showed a bit of compassion. He said the usual words, but they didn’t ring true. He didn’t apologize for the shoddy equipment, the poor upkeep on the rails (the company owns them), the fact that there is only one person on a train pulling 73 tanker cars filled with crude oil, in tankers that are borderline illegal, as they were designed for shipping items like corn syrup! I know there’s an inquiry under way. I hope they place blame where it lies.
This town was a lovely little lakeside town, one of the prettiest in Quebec, especially the central part of the town that was destroyed. It’ll never be the same.
ETA: sorry, I started this response intending to thank you all for your concern and kind words.
From what I’ve gleaned from the news, seems that it has to be either: (1) the people who last handled the train (the driver, the firefighters) doing something wrong; (2) deliberate sabotage; (3) equipment failure; (4) negligent procedures on the part of the company.
(3) seems unlikely to me, because if the handbrakes were set, there ought to be redundancy (that is, several of them have to fail at the same time).
(2) is of course possible, but there is no evidence I’ve heard so far. Presumably, it could be as simple as someone going around and undoing all the hand brakes. Are they locked in some way? I don’t know. Given the near-total incineration of the cars carrying the oil, it may be very difficult to determine what happened.
(4) remains a possibility, depending on what happened.
The problem alleged by the company is that the hand-brakes were not set sufficiently. Each car in the train has hand brakes. A certain amount need to be set - manually - by climbing into each car and physically turning the wheel.
A possible scenario is that everyone on the scene assumed that the driver set the hand brakes correctly before he checked in for the night. However, perhaps he’d gotten slack, and didn’t bother, at the end of a long shift, to set as many of them as he was supposed to - knowing that the air brakes would be on also. With the fire, the air brakes were shut down by the firefighters in order to combat the fire. The people on the scene didn’t attach any importance to that, because of course the hand brakes would keep the train in place; if they had contacted the driver, he may have realized ‘oh shit, I didn’t actually secure those brakes properly - better do that now!’, but they didn’t.
In that scenario, both the driver and the guys on the scene were guilty of negligence - the driver for not setting the brakes properly, and the guys on the scene (including I understand a company rep.), for not asking the driver if he did. But of the two, the driver was more at fault.
The train driver still, I understand, maintains that he did set the hand brakes correctly. If so, it can only be equipment failure (unlikely because of redundancy) or deliberate sabotage.
Legally, under the law of vicarious liability, if the company employees were at fault, the company would be on the hook for damages (I assume that the Civil Law is like the Common Law in this), but I understand criminal liability works differently.
I think we’re going to find out that this is exactly what happened. He’s probably parked trains there many, many times under similar circumstances with no issues.
I know I’m jumping to conclusions, but I’m pretty sure this will be the outcome.
Depends on why they failed. If the railroad company doesn’t do proper maintenance leading to some significant percentage of handbrakes to be holding with less force than is proper, then a number of brakes might be set that would be sufficient for there to be redundant holding power if they were working to spec, but that is actually marginal. Then a single failure might lead to the observed result.
Hopefully the investigation can piece together what actually happened from all that tangled wreckage.
Fair enough; but if this is the case, and there were maintenance problems with a significant percentage of hand brakes on this train, it should be easy to determine, since the company’s other cars not involved in the disaster ought to display the same maintenance issues - and they are available for inspection (and you can bet they will be inspected!).
It would be a remarkable coincidence if only the cars making up this particular train had maintenance issues degrading a significant portion of the brakes.
One engineer running a train is pretty standard in most countries. (And as evidenced by the derailment in Burlington that killed a crew of three, having another guy in the locomotive doesn’t always help things.) And the rails had nothing to do with it; the train was careening into a turn at a speed at least three or four times faster than the turn was designed to take. The rails could have been brand new and the train was going to derail.
Where the company’s fucked up here is in making claims before they had all the facts in. “All procedures were followed, it’s someone else’s fault” and then sheepishly saying “um, maybe not” is basically equivalent to saying “We have no clue.” The correct response would have been to say “we don’t know yet, but we’re going to help any way we can.” In other words he should have said the equivalent of nothing except “we will help” rather than throwing blame around when he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
As to WHY this happened, of course the usual blame is being cast about; Thomas Mulcair has already blamed the Tories, to an extent so shameful the Liberals attacked him for it.
But when it comes to safety incidents, even ones as catastrophic as this, there’s almost never one thing. It’s always a combination of things. Did the engineer do everything correctly? Probably not. But why was it possible to do things wrong? Why were there not safeguards in place? Why was a resting position chosen that was in an elevated sport where a brake failure would result in the train going down a steep path? Why was the engineer, or the company, not brought on scene when a fire broke out earlier? What training was or was not in place? Handbrakes failed? Then the preventive maintenance system wasn’t designed or implemented correctly. 11 handbrakes not enough? Bad procedure; it should have been clear how many handbrakes were needed for a given load in a given position.
Look at any accident and it’s always a culmination of fuckups. But ultimately it is MMA’s fault. The engineer fucked up? He was their employee, trained by them, subject to their rules and a product of their corporate safety culture. Brakes weren’t set right? Well, it’s their fault it was physically possible for that to be done. Train parked on hill? Their fault that that was SOP. It’s their train, and it’s their fault. Murphy’s Law reigns supreme in matters of safety, and I mean the real Murphy’s Law, not the “everything sucks” version - you must assume things will go wrong so that you will do something to make it so they won’t go wrong. All kinds of things were allowed to take place here that made it possible for things to go wrong. The blame lies squarely with MMA and they should pay the price.
I have no doubt the company - or possibly its insurer - will pay the price, in terms of dollars. Vicarious liability and all that. Other than deliberate sabotage (and maybe even then, for allowing it to be possible) I can’t see how they can escape liability.
The question that still remains, and I think the one of greater interest to the angry survivors, is if anyone has criminal responsibility. That’s still an open issue.
Having a bunch of intersecting fuckups spreads the responsibility too widely for criminal responsibility.
Indeed, I don’t disagree with any of this.
I’d also like to know how the initial fire in the locomotive started. I suspect that under normal circumstances, running locomotives do not spontaneously ignite. Was that a maintenance issue? Freak accident caused by a raccoon? Obviously the response to the fire is a part of the leadup to the accident, but why was there a fire in the first place?
Good question. If the cause has ever been described in the news, I’ve not heard it yet.
No worries. 
He should have indeed shown compassion; it is nowhere near time for him to start trying to pass blame around.
Exactly. That’s what makes me think he is one clueless individual - he was the face of the company that caused so much pain for so many people, and he needed to do better.
Hell, he should consider himself very lucky he didn’t get things thrown at him.
Maybe the police took him in for questioning for his own protection…
Was the initial fire in the locomotive? I haven’t seen the CEO video but nothing else I’ve seen specified that it was in the train just near it.
On a whole different topic, here’s an amusing video describing the border between Canada and the USA. It mentions the North-West Angle on Lake of the Woods, but sadly doesn’t go into why there’s a massive portion of Maine that really ought to be Québec.
That was interesting! I always wondered about the Northwest Angle.
The accounts I’ve seen say it was near the engine. That’s why the firefighters turned off the engine - to keep the fuel from adding to the fire.
I agree. Companies have Public Relations departments, which (among other tasks) are charged with damage control when things go wrong. So far, we’ve only heard from the railroad president, who doesn’t seem to have been coached by his PR department. I believe that he means well, and that both the railroad and insurance will do all they can, as he says; but from a PR standpoint, he’s pretty much blundered every step of the way in his dealings on the ground with the townspeople affected.
One of my golf buddies was a locomotive engineer for the CPR. He only retired recently, so he’d be aware of current equipment and operating procedures, as well as Transport Canada’s railway rules. If I get the chance to play with him soon, I’ll ask him about such things as parking a train, setting manual brakes, etc.