Home
»
Trains Magazine
»
Forums
»
General Discussion
»
Village evacuated after Quebec train derailment

Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
Paul, I found this detailed report about the fire.  It sounds like a fuel oil fire.  When she mentions the very strong scent of fuel, that would be fuel leaking onto a hot surface and vaporizing.  It would create a fog of unburned fuel vapor, which is really irritating to breathe.  Apparently, that leaking oil eventually ignited from the hot surface that had been vaporizing it.  I did not realize it, but the engineer went to a hotel in Lac-Megantic, so he was there at the site of the wreck when the train arrived and piled up.  That would explain how he was available to help pull back the tank cars that had not derailed.  I had read the account of somebody at the hotel seeing the engineer respond almost in a state of shock, but I did not realize that he was right there at ground zero.  He was shaken out of bed by the blast just like everyone else in the hotel.  I had thought he was in a hotel in the town with the parked train: (QUOTED FROM THE LINKED ARTICLE) On Friday evening, the eastbound train, five locomotives and 72 tanker cars, all but one carrying crude oil, sat parked for the night about 10 kilometres to the west of Lac-Mégantic, in the village of Nantes. The engineer, Tom Harding, was the only employee of the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway (MMA) on the train. He left to check in to a hotel in Lac-Mégantic. Danielle Veilleux was driving back to her home in Nantes after a camping trip when the powerful smell of fuel permeated her car. She was approaching her house, across the street from the tracks, and noticed there were sparks flying from a parked train. A huge cloud of smoke surrounded her car. “There are always trains running through here and they smell, but this was a very strong scent of fuel,” she said, mentioning there were no firefighters in sight. Around 11:30 p.m., a fire in a parked locomotive was reported to the rail-traffic controller by a citizen. Firefighters and an employee of MMA (not the engineer) arrived on site. The fire was extinguished. Around midnight, the locomotive’s engine was shut down. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here is the link.  It is an extremely well-written and emotionally powerful chronology of the whole incident: <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2013/07/12/lac_megantic_explosion_a_chronicle_of_the_tragedy.html">http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2013/07/12/lac_megantic_explosion_a_chronicle_of_the_tragedy.html</a>
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag