LAC-MEGANTIC, Quebec, (Reuters) – The head of the company whose runaway oil-tanker train exploded and devastated a Quebec town faced cries of “murderer” from residents yesterday, and he said the train’s hand brakes were likely set improperly, causing the calamity.
Police say they expect the death toll to rise to 50, confirming the worst fears of residents who had mostly given up hope that the missing would be found alive. Police earlier had said 60 people were dead or missing.
More than 200 investigators are sifting through charred wreckage in the center in the eastern Quebec town of Lac-Megantic, in what authorities say is a crime scene. They have made no arrests.
The disaster happened early on Saturday after a parked Montreal Maine & Atlantic (MMA) train came free on a sloping stretch of rail line and headed downhill, without a driver, toward the lakeside town.
The train, with five locomotives hauling 72 cars of crude oil, derailed on a curve and blew up just after 1 a.m., flattening the center of the town in a series of massive explosions.
MMA, like many North American railroads, has vastly stepped up crude-by-rail deliveries as producers seek alternatives to pipelines that have been stretched to capacity by higher U.S. and Canadian output.
One focus of the probe into the disaster is whether the engineer, the train’s only operator, set enough hand brakes on the train when he parked it some eight miles (13 km) west of town at the end of his shift on Friday night.
The comments from MMA Chairman Ed Burkhardt were his clearest yet on what he thought had gone wrong.
“It’s very questionable whether the hand brakes were properly applied on this train. As a matter of fact I’ll say they weren’t, or we wouldn’t have had this incident,” he told an outdoor news conference in Lac-Megantic.
As he spoke, irate town residents looked on and called out repeatedly, on occasion drowning out his words. Some could be heard shouting “murderer!”
“There are no words to describe what this man did here,” Alyssia Bolduc, 23, told Reuters afterwards.
Burkhardt, who said he did not think sabotage was involved, told reporters he understood why people were angry.
