Apple Mac iPod and iPhone: Lac Mégantic Rail Disaster

lundi 8 juillet 2013

Lac Mégantic Rail Disaster

Surprised this hasn't come up as a thread... two days' old now...

Lac-Mégantic's tragedy is a most unnatural disaster

On a beautiful summer night, we are to believe, 73 driverless cars of the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway somehow came broke loose on a siding near Nantes, 12 kilometres to the west of town, and began rolling quietly, unnoticed, down the hilly incline, gathering speed in their “inertia’’ — no power other than gravity — aiming right at the heart of an unsuspecting community at the bottom.

The brakes and safety system were apparently functional, nothing to worry about, when the engineer had departed just before midnight for a comfortable bed at a local hotel. A replacement was slated to come aboard later during the night.

If there were anti-derail safety devices on the track — designed to guide cars off the rails at selected spots, as protection against collisions — they clearly did not work. Heedless, that bulk of metal and — most ruinously, crude oil tankers — escalated towards Lac-Megantic, hurtling into the downtown district, its locomotive breaking free at some point before the crash, a mere 9 metres from the Musi-Café, a popular and Saturday-night crowded bar.

Those fortunate to escape the resulting inferno fled on foot, some even jumping into boats that roared off into the waters offshore, beyond the explosions and flames and eye-singing heat. The sky, said residents, turned from black to vivid orange and red — the colours of warning-label danger, still so hellfire hot late Sunday afternoon that firefighters who’d rushed to the scene from as far away as Sherbrooke and Maine, across the border, could approach no closer than 150 metres distant of two fuel cars that remained burning.

The guts of Lac-Megantic have been spilled, reduced to ashes. All those suburban commercial totems — the Dollarama store, the Metro supermarket — businesses and restaurants razed, on the scorched earth of a 5-square-kilometre central district. Worst of all, besides the five bodies that had been recovered by last night, upwards of 40 people still missing, perhaps “vaporized’’ in the fireball — many of them, it seems, Musi-Café patrons who never saw death coming.

If a loved one in Lac-Megantic hasn’t come home yet, they may never be coming home.