‘Tragedy on top of a tragedy’: mother of explosion victim Eastway Tank dies

Janet Ferguson lost her best friend when her 26-year-old daughter Kayla was killed in the January 2022 explosion at Ottawa’s Eastway Tank, Pump and Meter Ltd.

Now her family is once again mourning the recent death of Janet Ferguson at the age of 47.

“Tragedy on top of tragedy,” Reggie Ferguson said outside the Carleton Place, Ont., funeral home where his sister’s wake took place Thursday.

According to her obituaryJanet Ferguson died on June 23 — nearly a year and a half after the January 13, 2022 explosion that killed her daughter and five other tanker manufacturer employees: Rick Bastien, Etienne Mabiala, Danny Beale and Russell McLellan.

A sixth Eastway employee, Matt Kearney, died in hospital the following day.

Reggie Ferguson said Kayla’s death in an event that “shouldn’t have happened” destroyed his sister.

“That’s all she talked about,” he said.

“Wish She Was Still Here”

Janet Ferguson’s Facebook timeline in the year after the explosion was like an open wound.

She wrote about mental health, self-improvement And the fear of being without her daughter during the holidays.

“I really miss you today,” she wrote on Christmas Day.

Just before the first anniversary of the explosion, when the Ontario Ministry of Labor charged Eastway Tank owner Neil Greene and the company with three identical charges of unsafe work practices on the day of the blast — Ferguson’s voice trembled with emotion.

“It’s just been really hard,” she told CBC on Jan. 6.

“I really wish she was still around,” she said of Kayla, adding that her daughter had worked at Eastway for about a year and a half and “had everything going for her.”

Janet Ferguson, according to her brother, struggled with substance abuse in the wake of her daughter’s death, but had recently become clean.

She had recently obtained her driver’s license and qualified for the Ontario Disability Support Program, he said.

But she was also in and out of the hospital in pain and died after a heart attack, he said.

Their father took the news particularly hard.

“We went to say goodbye to her,” recalls Reggie Ferguson. “All my dad could say was, ‘My little girl is dead, my little girl is dead.'”

Louise Martel, whose fiancé Rick Bastien also died in the Eastway explosion, said she and Janet Ferguson planned to go to the Eastway site to replace the faded photos that have served as a shrine to the victims.

“I don’t want to go there alone,” Martel said. “We didn’t have the chance.”

Eastway trial scheduled for March 2024

Janet Ferguson had expressed impatience with the pace of the investigation into the explosion before the charges against Greene and Eastway were announced.

“It’s been almost a year. This is so frustrating,” she told CBC on Dec. 12.

Her death came just under two weeks before it was announced that the case against Greene and Eastway will go to trial. It is not scheduled to start until March 2024 and is expected to last 40 days, until June.

“I wish it was done and over so my dad could shut it down,” said Reggie Ferguson.

A parallel criminal investigation by the Ottawa Police Department is underway, police said earlier this week.

A short distance from the Carleton Place funeral home, where the family gathered, a plaque honoring Kayla was erected in a park last year.

Reggie Ferguson hopes one can be added for his sister.

“They were happy-go-lucky together,” he said. “Now … they’ll probably be happy together in heaven.”