One year after an oil-laden train derailed, exploded and killed 47 people in a town in Canada’s Quebec Province, trains are rolling again, but locals are hardly thrilled. The picturesque lakeside town of Lac-Megantic was transformed by Canada’s worst rail catastrophe in 15 years.
An area of 2.5km2 was ravaged. And for now, only trains carrying lumber rumble through the town, about 250km east of Montreal.
That is enough to scare people in the town of 6,000, who now live in what looks like a giant construction site.
Photo: Reuters
“People hate that,” said Edith, who did not give her last name and manages a grocery store just 50m from the turn where the 72-car train derailed in the early morning hours of July 6 last year.
The train carrying 7.2 million liters of crude oil from North Dakota to a refinery in easternmost Canada came loose in the middle of the night, rolled downhill unmanned and derailed in the center of town.
Firefighters needed two days to put out the raging blaze. Seven of the dead were never identified. For now, hazardous materials are barred from passing through Lac-Megantic, but locals are convinced that “it will not be long before the black cars come back,” Edith said, referring to train cars carrying oil.
Somehow, her shop and the church across the street escaped damage from the fire. Since the tragedy, she says customers are demoralized by the slow pace of reconstruction of the gutted part of town and the wait for insurance companies to pay up.
Her colleague, Jocelyn, sums up how locals are torn over the future: “If there were no more trains, this would be a ghost town.”
Local companies depend on the trains to export their forestry products. Indeed, the rail lines were among the first infrastructure elements rebuilt after the accident.
Around these new tracks, bulldozers dig up dirt contaminated to a depth of 7m by the spilled shale oil being shipped in from North Dakota.
Nothing remains of some shopping streets along the lake. Thirty buildings were reduced to ashes and just as many are awaiting demolition. Vegetation burned away. Only a few trees on the limits of the fire’s origin remain, and they are half-burned.
Some stores, and notably the bar where most of the fatalities occurred, were only recently rebuilt, just a stone’s throw from the ravaged downtown area, as merchants await a plan from town hall for an overall revitalization plan. Authorities have launched a public appeal for ideas on what to do, even to elementary-school students.
“For a town of this size, that is unprecedented,” one urban planner working on the project said.
In a town-hall session this month, about 350 people were asked to comment on proposed projects, such as a new hotel, an “urban forest” and a public square by the lake. Often, the issue of the train tracks comes up. As the plan stands now, the railway lines will continue to run through town.
“That will remain an open wound if we do not move them,” Marcel Philippon said.
The retiree added that the urban planners’ projects are very ambitious.
The town is to adopt an action plan by the end of the year on the basis of the recommendations it receives, but no one knows what is to happen with the train tracks.
A stretch bypassing the town would be only 9km long, but the cost is estimated at between US$50 million and US$150 million.
The railroad is owned by the US firm Montreal Maine & Atlantic Railway, and neither it nor the Quebec authorities seem keen on assuming that cost on their own.
However, Remi Tremblay, editor in chief of the local newspaper L’Echo de Frontenac, said: “There is a consensus among the population for a bypass rail line. It is about the only thing on which there is agreement.”
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