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Posted on 07/08/2013 12:50:43 PM PDT by Islander828
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Good, that is.
First was that the Nantes FD put out a fire or some type and left.
Then that they went to the fire and put it out while there was an MMA rep there (not the engineer who was by now at the bottom of the hill).
Now they just called and talked to MMA before leaving.
So now the Nantes FD were the last ones to touch the train.
It still seems wrong to me to park a train with a unit load that wants to go somewhere for hours out along a road in the "middle of nowhere". Especially without putting manual brakes on a fair number of the cars.
At last, we know how this happened.
The railroad is now in liability hell. And the whole concept of shipping crude oil by rail is in deep doo-doo -- all because the maintenance and safety procedures practiced on short-line railroads are so laughably deficient.
I believe the oil was Athabascan crude heading in the opposite direction, for delivery to a tanker in St. John or at Searsport, ME.
Bakken ND sweet light crude bound for a Canadian refinery in Atlantic Canada.
""“The train went by at 75 miles an hour, it was going like a crazy train,” said resident Gilles Fluet, who had just called it a night and left the popular Musi-Café shortly after 1 a.m. Saturday with his two friends when he saw the freight train barrelling down the tracks that cut through town.
“The wheels were smoking, because the brakes were overheating. I said to my friends, ‘Run, because that’s not going to make the turn. It’s going to crash.’ We could see they were all tankers carrying oil.”
They ran up the street and turned the corner just before the first explosion. “It was a hot wind, a bit like a torch had hit us,” Mr. Fluet, 65, said. “The wife of the guy with me was burned on her arm and leg. She was knocked down by the explosion.”
They managed to gather themselves and run to safety.
Apparently the engineers and financiers and lawyers figured out 100 yr ago that pipelines were the way to go for both crude and finished product.
I’m trying to figure out why a refinery in the Atlantic provinces would be importing oil from North Dakota when the Terra Nova and Hibernia oil fields off the coast of Newfoundland are two of the largest producers of crude oil in North America.
I assume that most oil buys are some sort of long-term contract. It could be that E. Canada oil is under contract to Europe or China?
What I’ve read today seems to indicate that the FD says as much, but that they notified the RR authorities of everything they did, and it was “up to them” to follow up. I would say a JANFU ( Joint Army Navy ... )
Here’s a strange thing: Reports say the train was “parked” in Nantes, and rolled about six miles into Lac Megantic. The site of the wreck seems consistent with this.
However, Google Earth indicates that Nantes is about 80’ LOWER than Lac M., and there is a steep gradient upwards from there continuing to the south.
Now, GE has very crude resolution of this area, but the locations are very definite due to the bodies of water ( Lac M. and Lac Whitton next to Nantes. ) The details can be seen in Google Maps.
Still, I raise this as a puzzling question, not an assertion of any kind. Thought: If the FD shut down the lead engine, which ran the air compressor, might the other four engines have idled the train along after the brakes let loose ?
Hard to imagine they haven't been burned to ashes. How can they do a body count?
I found a site, FIND YOUR ALTITUDE, which shows Lac Megantic at 400 m and Nantes at 517 m . That would be a 1% grade over 10km or so.
“There are unconfirmed reports that the local fire department shut the engine off, which released the brakes.”
Did they say why? Maybe an “air pollution” law against idling engines?
The engine was on fire -- apparent fuel or oil leak.
Although I'm not sure I think that it's very unusual,if not unheard of,for a human body to burn to absolute dust...except,perhaps,in the cremation process.Depending on how thorough authorities want to be they can even look for bones and bone fragments and do some kind of rough arithmetic to determine how many people they've found.
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