This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/08/quebec-train-explosion-police-investigate

The article has changed 2 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 0 Version 1
Quebec train explosion site still too dangerous for police to investigate Quebec train explosion death toll rises to 13 as police gain access to site
(about 7 hours later)
Canadian police on Monday struggled to find the remains of people killed when a driverless crude oil train derailed and blew up in a small Quebec town over the weekend as questions grew over how the disaster had occurred. The death toll in the devastating oil train derailment in Quebec reached 13 on Monday, while about 40 people remained missing, officials said after investigators finally got near where the runaway train exploded.
The five locomotives and 72 oil cars had been parked about eight miles from Lac-Mégantic on Friday night. The brakes then somehow released and the train gathered pace as it rolled down a hill into the center of the town early on Saturday morning. Quebec provincial police Sgt Benoit Richard said Monday eight more bodies had been found in the wreckage, after conditions improved enough for inspectors to get better access to the charred site two days after the disaster.
It derailed and exploded into a gigantic fireball, flattening dozens of buildings and killing five people. Another 40 are missing and few residents hold out hope that they will be found alive. Police would not say where the bodies were located for fear of upsetting families.
Police said they had been unable to examine much of the town center overnight because the area was still too dangerous. Dozens of tanker wagons, some of them destroyed, are lying at the accident site. All but one of the train's 73 tanker cars were carrying oil when they came loose early Saturday, sped downhill nearly seven miles (11km) into the town of Lac-Mégantic, near the Maine border, and derailed, with at least five of the cars exploding.
"It's an area that is still extremely risky … The fire service decided they could not allow us to go there for security reasons. We'll see what we can do today," police spokesman Benoit Richard told reporters on Monday. The blasts destroyed about 30 buildings, including a public library and a popular bar that was filled with revelers. Five bodies were found over the weekend.
One of the destroyed buildings was a music bar popular with young people. Lac-Mégantic, a lakeside town of 6,000 ringed by forests of pine and birch, is in the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec, close to the border with Maine and Vermont. About 2,000 people were evacuated. Richard said inspectors could now go where they needed. Officials had to wait for firefighters to dose the flames and cool the oil tankers that could have exploded.
None of the dead have been identified. Two of the badly burned bodies recovered so far have been sent to Montreal for identification and the other three will be transported there later on Monday, the coroner's office said. Investigators had been able to get closer to some of the "hot spots", such as the area near the destroyed Musi-Cafe, with the help of firefighters, he said.
/>"It's a zone that we've started to work on and we'll work on it more in the hours to come," he said.
Canada's Transportation Safety Board, which is probing the disaster, has retrieved the train's black box data recorder and a separate device that contains details of the braking system. The area remained part of a criminal investigation and all options were being explored by investigators, including the possibility that someone intentionally tampered with the train, Richard said.
The train – operated by the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway – had been parked at Nantes, 12km (eight miles) to the east of Lac-Mégantic, late on Friday night. Queen Elizabeth II earlier expressed deep sadness over the disaster Monday, saying in a message through the federal government that the loss of life "has shocked us all". Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper toured the town Sunday and compared it to a war zone.
Company chairman Ed Burkhardt said the engineer had shut down four of the five locomotive units on the train, a standard procedure, before heading to Lac-Megantic to sleep. The train's owners said they believed brake failure was to blame. "Somehow those brakes were released, and that's what is going to be investigated," Joe McGonigle, Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway's vice president of marketing, said Sunday.
Somehow, he told the Toronto Star, the fifth locomotive was also shut down.
/>
/>"If the operating locomotive is shut down, there's nothing left to keep the brakes charged up, and the brake pressure will drop finally to the point where they can't be held in place any longer," Burkhardt said. 		Officials were also looking at a locomotive blaze on the same train a few hours before the derailment.
Montreal Maine & Atlantic is one of many North American railroads that have vastly stepped up shipments of crude oil as pipelines from North Dakota and from Canada's oil-producing areas fill to capacity, and the accident is bound to raise concern about the practice. Meanwhile, crews were working to contain 100,000 liters (27,000 gallons) of light crude that spilled from the tankers and made its way into nearby waterways. There were fears it could flow into the St Lawrence River all the way to Quebec City.
Adding to the mystery is the fact that after the train was parked on Friday night, a part of it caught fire. Local firemen were called to put out the blaze.
/>It was not clear if the actions of the firemen could be linked to the derailment. 		Quebec's environment ministry spokesman Eric Cardinal said officials remained hopeful they could contain more than 85% of the spill.
In Nantes, a shopkeeper who would not give her name said locals were often irritated by trains being parked while still running their engines but said she had never heard of any cases in the town of vandalism on the tracks. The heart of the town of about 6,000 was leveled including a popular bar where several dozen revelers were believed to have been at the time of the explosions. About a third of the community was forced out of their homes.
/>Sophie L'Heureux, a manager at the bar, was woken up at home by the explosion. She said she believed there were about 50 people in the bar, including many close friends.
"This, for our small community, is an accident like 9/11," she told Reuters. "I'm in survival mode right now. My priority is to try sleep if I can, eat if I can," she said. "For the rest, it's one minute, one day at a time."
Raymond Lafontaine, who believed he lost three members of his family, including his son, said he was angry with what appeared to be lack of safety regulations.
"We always wait until there's a big accident to change things," he said. "Well, today we've had a big accident, it's one of the biggest ever in Canada."
Local fire chief Denis Lauzon said firefighters in a nearby community were called to a locomotive blaze on the same train a few hours before the derailment. Lauzon said he could not provide additional details about that fire since it was in another jurisdiction. McGonigle confirmed that a fire was reported after the first engineer tied up and went to a local hotel.
"We know that one of our employees from our engineering department showed up at the same time to assist the fire department. Exactly what they did is being investigated so the engineer wasn't the last man to touch that train, we know that, but we're not sure what happened," McGonigle said.
The growing number of trains transporting crude oil in Canada and the United States had raised concerns of a major disaster, and this derailment was sure to bolster arguments that a proposed oil pipeline running from Canada across the US one that Canadian officials badly want would be safer.
The train's oil was being transported from North Dakota's Bakken oil region to a refinery in New Brunswick on Canada's East Coast. Because of limited pipeline capacity in the Bakken region and in Canada, oil producers are increasingly using railroads to transport oil to refineries.
The Canadian Railway Association recently estimated that as many as 140,000 carloads of crude oil will be shipped on Canada's tracks this year up from 500 carloads in 2009. The Quebec disaster is the fourth freight train accident in Canada under investigation involving crude oil shipments since the beginning of the year.
Harper has called railroad transit "far more environmentally challenging" while trying to persuade the Obama administration to approve the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast.
Wayde Schafer, a North Dakota spokesman for the Sierra Club, has predicted such a catastrophe ever since crude began leaving the North Dakota by rail in 2008.
"I think anybody could have foreseen this," said Schafer. "It seemed like a disaster waiting to happen and it happened."
Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.
Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. Enter your email address to subscribe.Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. Enter your email address to subscribe.
Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox every weekday.Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox every weekday.