It hasn't made CNN,  but there was a bad train wreck in a small town in Quebec.   A train supposedly secured for the night,  broke away,  ran dow0n hill into the town,  jumped the rails, and blew up.\

   The last official death toll,  5 but more than 24 hours after the accident,  40 are missing,  and it is feared,  the fires were do bad,  that some bodies will never be found.

   The cargo-  crude oil


http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/latest-der … -1.1356862

It's very sad, still so many missing.

Looks like it was entirely avoidable. So sad.

It turns out that a buddy of mine from Quebec knew one of the two singers who were performing at the Musi-Café that night.  At the break, Yvon Ricard went out on the patio and Guy Bolduc went to the bar for a beer.  Yvon got out alive and Guy didn't.

Guy played guitar with my buddy's son and all three were pretty close friends, so you can imagine how they're affected.

All those lives lost and property destroyed because a transport company was shaving costs by reducing the number of employees to the absolute minimum.

Even so, if the engineer had been conscientious and had confirmed that there were handbrakes applied on enough of the tankers to ensure that the train would not move if the airbrakes were released, as he is normally required to do, the train would not have moved.

If the company had contacted the engineer, instead of a track worker, after the fire department shut down the one locomotive engine that was running, due to a fire in that unit's engine room, he would have started up the engine of one of the other four locomotives to maintain the air pressure and keep the airbrakes on.

There's enough blame to go around, but the bottom line is that the rail company's practices were an accident waiting to happen, and it finally happened.

Most people I know believe it was caused by Big Oil to get the government to pass the Keystone Pipeline measures through Congress ASAP...saying "See, looks what could happen if we keep using rail".

Whole thing smells.

I think it's best to save the conspiracy theories for after the more logical and probable theories have been examined. 

While it's true that the timing might benefit pipeline interests, it's starting to appear that understaffing, gross negligence, incompetence and poor communications all added up to finally cause a disaster that already had been likely to happen for some time.

This may be the only railway using 1-man crews.  One unaccompanied engineer travelling long distances in control of five locomotives pulling seventy-three tanker cars full of flammable liquid.  No brakeman or helper with the engineer means that if he needed help to deal with a mechanical, electrical, or medical emergency, he'd be out of luck.

Leaving a heavy train loaded with explosive cargo unattended overnight at the top of a hill above a section of track that ran through the centre of a small town and included a turn that required the train to go very slowly to stay on the tracks is such a dangerous scenario that a conspiracy theory is actually kind of redundant.



If you watch this video, made by someone who appears to be a local, you'll see the scale of the fire and explosions and how half of the town could be levelled and fifty people killed.

He's speaking in French, saying all of downtown is in flames and the wagons keep exploding.  He tells his female friend to stay back and assures her he'll keep back.  He says the explosions are "hallucinante", meaning something like "trippy" or "unreal".  Take a look with it on full screen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRb3JHsi … r_embedded