Ten years after Megantic, experts say stricter rules, tougher enforcement needed | 24CA News
Kathy Fox nonetheless remembers the appears to be like on the faces of the grieving relations on the morning in August 2014, as she tried to clarify how the Lac-Megantic rail catastrophe had occurred.
“You can imagine the grief, the shock, the anger, all the emotions,” Fox recalled. “It was a hard day.”
The Transportation Safety Board chair was within the faculty auditorium to ship the company’s report on the tragedy — and the failures that allowed an unattended prepare carrying 72 tankers stuffed with crude oil to careen off the rails at over 100 km/h, bursting into flames within the coronary heart of the lakeside neighborhood on July 6, 2013.
Forty-seven individuals have been killed within the inferno, creating the worst rail accident in trendy Canadian historical past.
The hearth, which burned for 2 days earlier than lastly being quelled by the efforts of some thousand firefighters, worn out a lot of the centre of the 6,000-person city.
A slew of investigations, courtroom instances, studies and regulatory modifications adopted over the succeeding decade.
The authorities banned one-person crews on trains hauling hazardous cargo and set new requirements to make tank vehicles carrying flammable liquids sturdier. It additionally established stricter accident legal responsibility guidelines, imposed decrease velocity limits in rural and concrete areas and gave Transport Canada stronger enforcement powers.
Forty-seven individuals have been killed within the inferno, creating the worst rail accident in trendy Canadian historical past.
The division boosted the variety of rail security inspectors to 155 in 2022 from 107 in 2013, stated Nadine Ramadan, the transport minister’s spokeswoman, in an electronic mail. It has additionally quadrupled the tally of inspectors of harmful items to 188 from 30.
The security document
Despite new penalties and harder guidelines round security administration, consultants say the present regime is way from enough to make sure railways keep away from one other disaster.
“Have they made the improvements necessary to prevent another Megantic? My answer to that is no,” stated Bruce Campbell, an adjunct professor in environmental research at Toronto’s York University and creator of “The Lac-Megantic Rail Disaster: Public Betrayal, Justice Denied.”
Safety statistics don’t paint an particularly reassuring image.
Incidents involving uncontrolled motion of rail tools, which is what brought on the crash in Lac-Megantic, greater than doubled to 78 between 2010 and 2019 earlier than dropping off because of a pandemic-related dip in visitors, Fox stated.
Collisions and derailments on primary tracks — which the TSB notes can have the “highest severity” of all rail accidents — hit three accidents per million train-miles final 12 months.
That’s 25 per cent larger than the 10-year common, Fox stated.
Meanwhile, the amount of harmful items on the tracks rose 70 per cent between 2011 and 2019, in response to the federal government’s rail visitors database.
Bigger numbers imply larger danger, stated Mark Fleming, CN professor of security tradition at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.
The quantity of harmful items on the tracks rose 70 per cent between 2011 and 2019, in response to the federal government’s rail visitors database.
He pointed to a 2020 audit by the federal environmental and sustainable improvement commissioner, which discovered that Transport Canada “still had shortcomings in its oversight of dangerous goods, despite having made some progress.”
Self-regulation
Much of the continued issues round hazard on the tracks boils right down to oversight, technical requirements and the sheer measurement of trains and dangerous freight shipped.
After Lac-Megantic, Transport Canada launched an overhaul of security administration techniques — a type of self-regulation the place the federal government audits studies submitted by railways. But almost a decade later, firms “are not yet effectively identifying hazards and mitigating risks,” the protection board decided final 12 months.
“If you give the railways too free a hand, sometimes they make really poor decisions, and they’re not penalized for it,” stated Ian Naish, a rail security guide who served because the TSB’s director of rail and pipeline investigations between 1998 and 2009.
“Not putting together a proper safety management plan, and getting away with it year after year, and not doing proper risk analyses when they’re changing operations — I’d like that to change.”
The Railway Association of Canada stated the 2 greatest operators — Canadian National Railway Co. and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd., each of that are categorized as Class 1 because of their measurement — have one of the best security data in North America.
“For every railway and every railroader, safety is job one. Canadian Class 1s are industry leaders in safety and have lower train accident frequencies than their U.S. counterparts,” CEO Marc Brazeau stated in an emailed assertion.
Brazeau stated the accident charge for each freight rail and harmful items has improved markedly over the previous decade.
Nonetheless, security deficiencies performed a task within the catastrophe close to Field, B.C., in February 2019, the protection board discovered. At -28 C temperatures, compressed air leaked out of the air brake system whereas the prepare was parked on a steep grade, inflicting the Canadian Pacific vehicles to creep ahead after midnight earlier than hurtling down a mountain and careening off a bridge into the Kicking Horse River, killing three staff.
The authorities ought to require automated parking brakes and additional upgrades to braking techniques, stated Campbell, even after stricter guidelines round brake use got here into drive after 2013 for railways.
“They’re still relying so heavily on 19th-century braking systems. Electro-pneumatic braking systems would impose a cost, but they would have prevented Lac-Megantic,” Campbell stated.
The slowest tempo of change has arguably been round rail signalling — the trackside lights that authorize numerous prepare actions.
“If a crew member misses a signal, we still don’t have an automated train control system in Canada that will slow or stop a train if a crew doesn’t do it,” Fox stated, noting the U.S. has had a type of it in place since 2020. Transport Canada has pledged to implement one thing related by 2030.
Other components
The rising size of trains, which might run effectively over 4 kilometres lengthy with tons of of vehicles weighing greater than 25,000 tonnes in whole, poses one other concern.
Derailments involving longer, heavier trains imply a “worse pileup,” stated Naish.
Fatigue additionally stays a difficulty, even after new guidelines got here into impact on May 25 that cap freight staff’ most shift size at 12 hours — down from 16 — whereas elevating the minimal relaxation interval between shifts to 10 hours at residence and 12 hours when away from residence, versus the earlier six hours and eight hours, respectively.
But unheeded guidelines are of little use, Naish notes. On June 6, a Federal Court decide discovered CPKC responsible of contempt of courtroom for workers working excessively lengthy hours in 2018 and 2019. CPKC has vowed to attraction.
“Transport Canada, who’s the regulator, should use its teeth a little bit more than they do,” Naish stated. “They’re just a little bit too gentle with the railways.”
Risks, spills and different accidents stay alarmingly excessive, he continued.
On April 15, a Canadian Pacific freight prepare derailed because of a monitor washout in rural Maine. It spilled diesel gasoline and 4 lumber vehicles caught hearth, on the identical line and about 90 kilometres east of the place the Lac-Megantic accident unfolded.
“You stand back and say, are things getting better?” Naish requested. “If they are, I haven’t noticed it.”
Fox, who stepped into the position of security board chair in 2014 — two days after that briefing to tons of of grievers, together with a few of the 27 orphaned kids — retains on her desk a continuing reference to the necessity to maintain bettering security.
It’s {a photograph} of the streetscape of Lac-Megantic from earlier than the accident. In view are the Musi-Cafe — the place 30 of the victims have been killed when the fireball erupted at about 1:15 a.m. — and, within the distance, the native church.
“It is a daily reminder of what happened,” Fox stated by telephone from her workplace in Ottawa. “We don’t ever, ever want to see another Lac-Megantic.”
