Ten years after Mégantic, experts say stricter rules, stricter enforcement are needed

Kathy Fox still remembers the looks on the faces of grieving family members the morning of August 2014 as she tried to explain how the Lac-Mégantic train disaster had happened.

“You can imagine the sadness, the shock, the anger, all the emotions,” Fox recalled.

“It was a tough day.”

The chairman of the Transport Safety Board was in the auditorium of the school to present the agency’s report on the tragedy – and the failures that derailed an unattended train carrying 72 tankers full of crude oil at more than 100 km/h off the rails and went up in flames. the heart of the lakeside community on July 6, 2013.

Forty-seven people died in the inferno, creating the worst rail accident in modern Canadian history.

The fire, which burned for two days before finally being extinguished by the efforts of some 1,000 firefighters, destroyed much of the center of the 6,000-resident city.

A slew of investigations, lawsuits, reports and regulatory changes followed over the next decade.

The government banned single-person crews on trains carrying dangerous cargo and set new standards to make tank wagons carrying flammable liquids more robust. It also established stricter accident liability rules, imposed lower speed limits in rural and urban areas, and gave Transport Canada stronger enforcement powers.

The department increased the number of rail safety inspectors from 107 in 2013 to 155 in 2022, Nadine Ramadan, the transport minister’s spokeswoman, said in an email. It has also quadrupled the number of dangerous goods inspectors from 30 to 188.

The security file

Despite new penalties and stricter safety management rules, experts say the current regime is far from sufficient to ensure the railways avoid another catastrophe.

“Have they made the necessary improvements to avoid a new Mégantic? My answer to that is no,” said Bruce Campbell, an adjunct professor of environmental studies at York University in Toronto and author of “The Lac-Mégantic Rail Disaster: Public Betrayal, Justice Denied.”

Safety statistics do not paint a particularly reassuring picture.

The number of incidents involving uncontrolled movement of rail equipment, which was the cause of the Lac-Mégantic crash, more than doubled to 78 between 2010 and 2019 before coming to a halt due to a pandemic-related dip in traffic, Fox said.

Collisions and derailments on mainline tracks – which the TSB notes can have the “highest severity” of all rail accidents – hit three accidents per million train kilometers last year.

That’s 25 percent higher than the 10-year average, Fox said.

Meanwhile, the volume of dangerous goods on rail increased by 70 percent between 2011 and 2019, according to the government’s rail traffic database.

Greater numbers mean greater risk, said Mark Fleming, CN professor of safety culture at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

He pointed to a 2020 audit by the federal Commissioner for Environment and Sustainable Development, which found that Transport Canada “continued to have shortcomings in its oversight of dangerous goods, despite some progress.”

Self-regulation

Much of the ongoing concern about rail danger boils down to oversights, technical standards, and the sheer size of trains and dangerous cargo being carried.

After Lac-Mégantic, Transport Canada launched a review of safety management systems – a form of self-regulation where the government audits reports from the railways. But nearly a decade later, companies “are not yet effective in identifying hazards and mitigating risk,” the Security Council concluded last year.

“If you give the railways too much free rein, they sometimes make really bad decisions, and they don’t get punished for it,” said Ian Naish, a railway safety consultant who served as director of rail and pipeline investigations at the TSB between 1998 and 1998. 2009.

“Not putting together a good safety management plan and getting away with it year after year, and not doing proper risk assessments when they change operations – that’s what I’d like to see.”

The Railway Association of Canada said the two largest operators – Canadian National Railway Co. and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd., both of which are categorized as Class 1 due to their size – have the best safety records in North America.

“Safety is the first task for every railway line and every railway company. Canadian Class 1s are industry leaders in safety and have fewer train accidents than their US counterparts,” CEO Marc Brazeau said in an emailed statement.

Brazeau said accident rates for both rail freight and dangerous goods have improved significantly over the past decade.

Nevertheless, safety deficiencies played a role in the February 2019 Field, BC, disaster, the Security Council found. In temperatures of -28 C, compressed air leaked from the air braking system while the train was parked on a steep incline, causing the Canadian Pacific cars to creep forward past midnight before hurtling down a mountain and hurtling off a bridge into the Kicking Horse River. , which killed three workers.

The government should require automatic parking brakes and further upgrades to braking systems, Campbell said, even after stricter brake-use regulations came into effect for railroads after 2013.

“They still rely so heavily on 19th century braking systems. Electro-pneumatic braking systems would come at a cost, but they would have prevented Lac-Mégantic,” Campbell said.

The slowest rate of change probably relates to rail signaling – the track lighting that authorizes different train movements.

“If a crew member misses a signal, we still don’t have an automated train control system in Canada that slows down or stops a train if a crew doesn’t,” Fox said. it has been in effect since 2020. Transport Canada has pledged to implement something similar by 2030.

Other factors

The growing length of trains, which can travel more than four kilometers with hundreds of cars weighing more than 25,000 tons in total, is another concern.

Derailments involving longer, heavier trains mean “worse pile-up,” Naish said.

Fatigue also remains a problem, even after new rules came into effect on May 25 limiting the maximum hours of freight workers to 12 hours (instead of 16 hours) while increasing the minimum rest period between shifts to 10 hours at home and 12 hours away from home , versus the previous six hours and eight hours respectively.

But rules that aren’t followed serve little purpose, Naish points out. On June 6, a federal court judge found CPKC guilty of contempt of court for workers who worked excessively long hours in 2018 and 2019. CPKC has vowed to appeal.

“Transport Canada, which is the regulator, should use its teeth a bit more than they do,” Naish said. “They’re just a little too soft with the railroads.”

Hazards, spills and other accidents remain alarmingly high, he continued.

On April 15, a Canadian Pacific freight train derailed due to a rail failure in rural Maine. Diesel fuel leaked out and four timber trucks caught fire, on the same line and about 90 kilometers east of where the Lac-Mégantic accident occurred.

“You step back and say, is it getting better?” asked Nais. “If so, I didn’t notice.”

Fox, who assumed the role of chairman of the Security Council in 2014 — two days after briefing hundreds of mourners, including some of the 27 orphans — keeps a constant reference on her desk to the need to keep improving security.

It is a photo of the street scene of Lac-Mégantic before the accident. Within sight are the Musi-Café – where 30 of the victims were killed when the fireball erupted at around 1:15 am – and, in the distance, the local church.

“It’s a daily reminder of what happened,” Fox said by phone from her Ottawa office. “We never, ever want to see a Lac-Mégantic again.”