Railway Chairman: Driverless Train in Canada Was Tampered With Before Deadly Crash …Update: Brakes Had Been Disabled
CNN:
The chairman of the company whose driverless train barreled into the small Quebec town of Lac-Megantic and unleashed a deadly inferno told a Montreal newspaper he believes it had been tampered with.“We have evidence of this,” Ed Burkhardt said in an interview published by the Montreal Gazette. “But this is an item that needs further investigation. We need to talk to some people we believe to have knowledge of this.”The company did not immediately return phone calls from CNN about the report. Burkhardt is the chief executive officer and president of Rail World, the parent company of the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, the operator of the derailed train.Seventy-two tanker cars carrying crude oil jumped the track early Saturday, setting off a huge fireball. At least 13 people are dead and 37 are missing. Officials in the town 130 miles east of Montreal say some were likely vaporized by the sheer intensity of the blaze, which burned for 36 hours.About 2,000 residents were evacuated. On Tuesday morning, authorities said the fire is now under control and 1,200 people will be permitted to go back to their homes immediately. Another 800 still cannot return, the officials said.
The brakes had been disabled on the train before the crash.
USA Today:
USA Today:
The air brakes on the runaway oil train that devastated a Quebec town early Saturday had been disabled by firefighters who were called to extinguish a blaze aboard one of the locomotives 90 minutes before the disaster, the head of the railway said Monday.
9 comments:
I think you may find that this is a case of stupidity coupled with sloth. There was some sort of small fire at the station and of the 5 engines used to move the train, the operators kept one running all night to engage the air brakes on the whole lot. The fire brigade came, put out the fire and switched off the engine AND THE BRAKES.
Here's the key paragraph that you have:
The air brakes on the runaway oil train that devastated a Quebec town early Saturday had been disabled by firefighters who were called to extinguish a blaze aboard one of the locomotives 90 minutes before the disaster, the head of the railway said Monday.
Huh.
You guys are talk above my head.
I don't really know what that means.
Your USA Today link, under it is the paragraph that I quoted.
The reason the train became a runaway is because the breaks were disabled.
They were disabled by the firefighters.
Oh, now I get it.
Sorry.
So it's not terrorism.
It's just a mistake, a very costly mistake.
I fucked up.
Or...what if this is corporate espionage? This could easily be corporate espionage.
I know you probably think I'm some tin-foil hat wearing lunatic, but hear me out.
Who benefits from this? Pipeline interests.
Who wants these trains stopped? Pipeline interests.
Who's really pushing the safety angle in the media right now? Pipeline interests.
And who do the pipeline interests own? Ezra Levant.
This is all very convenient for all of them, and very pointed in that direction. It's almost too obvious.
If you look at the talking points of this group, you'll see they're too pointed in one direction to be a real anarchist or environmental group.
They're not talking about how evil oil is…they're talking about how easy a target trains are.
Above all that, they're using their moment in the spotlight to announce to the world what their next target is.
How stupid do they think we are? Pretty stupid…so keep an open mind when you see stories like these.
What anarchist/enviro group would do this? None of them...that's who.
Watch for a lot of spin in the (owned by pipeline interests) media about how safe pipelines are, and how unsafe rail travel is.
Sun News would be a great place to start for that…since they're almost wholly owned by oil/gas corporations.
Also, don't be fooled by rag-tag "terror" groups invented to become patsies for this corporate crime should this tampering evidence get outed.
They'll probably try to bury this or point it at these idiotic group of terrorists (that were probably just made/set up) but this was cleverly designed to make rail travel seem unsafe, and pipelines seem safer.
If this is an anarchist group, they sure have a tight focus. Not buying it.
I call shenanigans on this narrative, and I hope the investigation into this entertains all options when examining the evidence, or the nature of this patsy group being setup to take the fall for pipeline interests.
... or maybe, Anonymous, just maybe it's the Jews.
;-)
No worries pastorius.
They are saying that there is still an investigation going on and more than likely charges will be pressed.
I'm sure that there was some negligence here. Afterall, if you park a train on a hill and are absolutely dependent on the brakes keeping it there, shouldn't someone have been responsible in monitoring them? Someone should have been there while the fire department was there.
I used to have a guy work for me who had been a CN rail dispatcher. He was 55, worked there for 40 years and had a pension twice my pay (the boss) thats not the point but I did learn quite a bit about trains from Joe. To keep the engine running is the lazy way of doing things, the cars all have brakes but they have to be set manually. I suspect it was 11.30 at night, the one (only) driver had a long day and said screw it all, the next crew will be here in a few hours, this is good enough. Train air brakes are the opposite of trucks, on trucks you need power to release them, on the trains you need power to apply them. I understand this stretch was at an incline of 1.2% leading down to town so when the brakes were released they may have only moved a fraction of an inch a minute but with a total weight of about 100,000 tons it would have picked up momentum with every yard.
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