OTTAWA — The Quebec town where runaway railroad tank cars filled with oil derailed and exploded over the weekend still did not know the full extent of the devastation on Monday as dangerous conditions limited the movements of investigators.
Mathieu Belanger/Reuters. Railroad tank cars lay scattered at the site of the derailment in Lac-Mégantic on Monday.
The provincial police said they had found eight more bodies in the town,
Lac-Mégantic, on Monday, raising the death toll to 13 from the “ghost
train” accident, as it has become known, which occurred early Saturday
morning. The police also increased the estimate of the missing people,
who are presumed to be dead, to 50.
While fires that raged for much of the weekend were largely under
control by Monday, Sgt. Benoît Richard of the provincial police, known
as Sûreté du Québec, said much of the site remained so dangerous that
officers were able to enter only when accompanied by firefighters.
The accident’s destructiveness also impeded efforts to recover bodies
and investigate the cause of the crash. Aerial photos of the popular
vacation town showed that much of its downtown had been reduced to
little more than ash. Le Musi-Café, a bar near the rail line that was
filled with patrons at the time of the derailment, had vanished under a
pile of burned and crushed tank cars.
Forensic anthropologists were traveling to the town to assist with the
recovery of remains, and the police were asking relatives for razors,
hairbrushes and other items belonging to the missing that might provide
DNA for identification.
Further delaying the recovery was a declaration of the accident site as a
crime scene. Sergeant Richard said that factor had delayed the removal
of the remains of the train as the police must document them and gather
evidence.
News reports in Quebec indicated that the missing included parents who
had been listening to a concert at Musi-Café but never returned to their
young children. At least one musician who had been performing at the
time of the wreck also was among those missing.
About 1,500 of the town’s 6,000 residents were still unable to return to
their homes on Monday, although officials said some might be allowed to
return on Tuesday. At least 30 buildings were destroyed.
Police officers and politicians in Lac-Mégantic declined to answer
questions about the cause of the derailment. The information void has
been filled with sometimes-contradictory accounts.
Denis Lebel, the federal transport minister, said on Monday that the
train’s locomotive had passed a safety inspection in the Montreal area
early on Friday, but he offered no further details.
The Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, which owns the train line,
said its engineer had parked the 72-car train late Friday near Nantes, a
village about 7.5 miles from Lac-Mégantic, and had left it unattended.
About 11:30 p.m., the volunteer Fire Department in Nantes put out a fire
in the locomotive.
Patrick Lambert, the chief of the Nantes Fire Department, told reporters
that his crew had shut down the locomotive after fighting the fire and
had informed the railway about its action.
“The people from M.M.A. told us: ‘That’s great — the train is secure,
there’s no more fire, there’s nothing anymore, there’s no more
danger,’ ” Mr. Lambert said. “We were given our leave, and we left.”
But in interviews on Monday with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
and Reuters, Edward Burkhardt, the chairman and chief executive of the
railway’s parent company, Rail World, appeared to blame the firefighters
for causing the accident by shutting down the train.
Mr. Burkhardt said their action had meant that the train’s brake system
gradually lost air pressure, “and an hour or so after the locomotive was
shut down, the train rolled away.” He also faulted the Fire Department
for not waking up the engineer, who was staying overnight at a hotel in
Lac-Mégantic, and taking him to the scene.
Earlier, Mr. Burkhardt, who did not respond to several requests for
comment, said the train had been properly secured. Further confusing his
account is the fact that since the 19th century, railways in North
America have used an air-braking system that applies, rather than releases, freight car brakes as a safety measure when it loses pressure.
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