The Calibre of This Man

He is, on the clear evidence, not averse to confronting a scene of utter devastation and the loathing opprobrium that has come his way from the people who call Lac Megantic home. He does not hold back on anything his quick mind spills out on enquiry. It is as though the head of a huge corporate body has carelessly thrown all caution to the winds. Or perhaps he sees no need of caution. Perhaps the man, in his 70s, who has seen enough of the world and of human affairs, feels it becomes him to simply say what his mind dictates.

"Our insurance inspectors had looked at the locomotive but we have not had time to do a complete investigation. I asked for accreditation to go into the yellow zone but it was denied.
"It's absolutely horrible, it looks a lot like a war zone."
"I feel absolutely awful about this. I understand the extreme anger (from residents and if I lived here I would be very angry with the company, too..." which will "do what we can, but we can't roll back time."

The Canadian Press, Paul Chiasson July 10, 2013
 
Rail World Inc. president Edward Burkhardt made in fact quite a few statements. The most controversial being his opinion that the Nantes fire department had inadvertently and unfortunately likely caused the unmanned 72-car train carrying oil to an Irving refinery in New Brunswick to run amok by shutting down the running locomotive. They did this, needless to say, following instructions when responding to a fuel-line-caused fire in that locomotive, one of five in the long train with its highly combustible load.

Parked on a main line, on a fairly steep slope, with no one on board to ensure that nothing awry might possibly occur. On the cusp of midnight something awry did occur; flames alerted a Nantes resident in whose close-by town the train had been left awaiting a crew change and a morning run, who alerted the fire department which alerted the rail company which sent out two of their employees to the scene to take charge and instruct the responding fire fighters once the fire was extinguished that they would look after things.

The question remains then who was looking after things, when a fairly short time after the firemen had left the scene in Nantes, the train began its rumble down the incline, picking up speed as it passed farms and forests to finally end up 11 kilometres from Nantes in the centre of Lac Megantic travelling by then at over 100 kilometres an hour when it hit a curve in the track in the centre of town that derailed the runaway train and caused hellfire and brimstone to visit the unaware residents of the town?

More conciliatory now toward the fire department whose head had advised the responding railway employees that they had shut down the engine, and who themselves had informed their head office of that fact, Mr. Burkhardt turned his attention to the behaviour of the engineer who had single-handedly driven the train, then left it after having secured it, to end his 12-hour shift by sleeping off his tired spirit in a nearby hotel. The Montreal Maine & Atlantic Railway train was one of only two in the country permitted to run trains with only one engineer on board.

"I think he did something wrong. He told us that he applied 11 handbrakes and our general feeling is now that that is not true. We think that he applied some handbrakes, the problem is that he didn't apply enough of them." Furthermore, he assured the reporters who fired off one question after another at him, his company would no longer employ the engineer. Nor would there henceforth be only one engineer on board all future trains as is common in the U.S. where the company is headquartered, but not in Canada.

There were scant few questions he avoided responding to. He made no effort to cut short the press conference, such as it was, handling all the queries frankly and in a manner that must surely have surprised many in the industry keeping a sharp eye on the proceedings, who must have been wondering why no public relations busybody had accompanied the man. He said this was a first for him in his long years in the rail industry. He had never seen anything like the devastation of the Lac Megantic crash.

Lac Megantic police  Police handout photos show extensive damage immediately around train explosion site in Lac Megantic, Que. 

There will be lawsuits, lots of them. His words of commiseration and admissions of responsibility, vague though they may seem to most, will come back to haunt him in court proceedings. "It was our employee that was responsible for setting the brakes on the train... That employee is under investigation and is not working. I don't think he'll be back working with us."

And he avowed in a wry quip to a perhaps-impertinent question about his personal wealth that it is much, much less, since Saturday. And it will be much less still, once the company and its head have completed their journey through the Canadian court system.