At 11PM last Friday night, the train stopped in Nantes, Quebec for a crew change. The next crew was not immediately available, so procedure demanded that the train be safely secured in place. Trains have three braking systems: air brakes connected through the entire train and operated from the locomotive, individual brakes on each locomotive, and individual “manual” brakes on each railcar. All three are required to be applied to a train that will be unoccupied.
In the case of the MMA train, it was left on a significant railroad grade that headed downward 6.8 miles (11 km) into Lac-Mégantic, requiring extra caution to secure it. The engineer left one of the five locomotives running, which is necessary to maintain the functionality of the train’s airbrakes. After the engineer left, a local resident reported a fire on one of the locomotives and firefighters from the town of Nantes responded.
Before dousing the fire, the firefighters followed standard procedure and shut down the locomotive to prevent fuel from the fuel tank feeding the fire. CEO Burkhardt claimed Monday that the firefighters, “Went out there by themselves, shut the engine off, doused the fire” and didn’t notify the engineer. Burkhardt claims the shutoff of the engine released the airbrakes causing the train to roll towards Lac-Mégantic.
Yet in an interview with the Globe and Mail a member of MMA’s board of directors, Yves Bourdon, contradicted the claim that firefighters acted without contacting MMA. He stated that firefighters called a MMA dispatcher and alerted him of the fire when it broke out, and the dispatcher got a track-repair worker to the scene.
The track-worker was not qualified to operate locomotives, but updated the dispatcher and left the scene. Nantes Fire Chief Patrick Lambert told the media, “The people from MMA told us, ‘That’s great―the train is secure, there’s no more fire, there’s nothing anymore, there’s no more danger,” upon which the firefighters left.
At a press briefing yesterday morning, a spokesman for Canada’s Transportation Safety Board corroborated much of Fire Chief Lambert’s account, asserting that contrary to the claims of MMA CEO Burkhardt, a company employee was present when firefighters doused the locomotive fire.
Shortly after that fire was put out and everyone had left the scene, the train began to roll and within 20 minutes it derailed, while traveling in excess of 60 mph, ending in a massive pileup in the center of Lac-Mégantic, causing explosions that left only rubble for a several block radius.
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In its statements, MMA has failed to state clearly that it was using a one-person crew to operate the oil train, although its explanations implicitly point to that. Across the US and Canada the standard is a two-person crew, consisting of an engineer that operates the train from the cab of the locomotive and a conductor that persons on-the-ground work equipment.
As head of Rail World Inc.—a “railway management, consulting and investment corporation specializing in privatizations and restructurings”— Burkhardt has pioneered one-man “crews.” Such operations call for the engineer to do on-the-ground work like switching out railcars, while using a remote-control pack to operate the engine.
Railway workers and others have long claimed that the “one-man crews” deliver corporations huge cost savings at the expense of worker fatigue and public safety.
Investigation will show to what extent relying on a single crew member at the end of a long-shift to park a loaded train on a grade late at night imperiled public safety. To have properly secured the train, the engineer would have had to walk to several, if not dozens, of individual cars and apply a hand-brake on each one.
The engineer of the MMA train is reportedly devastated over the event. The Toronto Star writes that, “like many others, he accused Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway of not keeping its infrastructure up to date and for not caring about its employees.”
“They haven’t even called us since the accident,” said a colleague.
Other employees have noted that MMA track in places is increasingly substandard. Prior to last Saturday’s tragedy, Lac-Mégantic town officials and residents had also raised concerns about the state of MMA’s infrastructure.
