Through This Town

"The windows are open and you hear this noise. You know the speed of a train. You know the noise of a normal train. You get used to it after 31 years. You say, 'That's not a fast train'. That's like a jet plane going by you. It was like, whoa."
"I know the survivors' guilt that is going to come. I know the stress of not having a job because your job is gone. I know how it is going to affect people. The rate of suicide goes up, drugs and alcohol abuse go up. I know what is coming."
"When you are alone and you have nothing to do, you think. And you relive. And you imagine. I know a little bit about what to expect because of 9/11. I had a brother in one of the towers. I had a brother on Wall St. who was in lockdown. I had a brother in Washington by the Pentagon and we didn't know if he was dead or alive."
"This wakes all of those emotions and you've just got to talk it through."
Meghan Plamondon Lac Megantic resident, volunteer

Rail World Inc. president Edward Burkhardt has said his company would partner with the Red Cross, insurers and governments in the funding of reconstruction of homes in Lac Megantic. "Our financial resources are going to be devoted to this. This comes first." His company has learned something from the tragedy; it will no longer depend on one-man train crews. "I really question right now whether that should continue (in the industry) -- I don't think it will. It certainly will not on this railway."

"I think he did something wrong. He told us that he applied 11 handbrakes and our general feeling is now that this is not true." The derailment and explosion in Lac Megantic with 20 bodies thus far pulled out of the smouldering wreckage and some thirty more being looked for will certainly not advantage the rail company that Edward Burkhardt represents. Their future prospect in the settlement of claims looks rather grim. This was no garden-variety, common oil spill or trail derailment in a yard.

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  Damaged rail containers and twisted wreckage can be seen on the main road through downtown 
  Lac-Mégantic, Que. early July 7, 2013, a day after a train carrying crude oil tankers derailed 
  and burst into flames.  (Moe Doiron/The Globe and Mail)

"Our railway runs through this town. We have a number of shippers who depend on rail service. So we hope that when the investigations are completed that we can go in and start to make a path through the wreckage and later we'll clean up all the wrecked cars and build track back and start to run trains through here again. Very carefully, I might tell you", said Rail World Inc.'s president, careful himself, to nuances of entitlements.

As well he might be. The owner of a somewhat related industry -- road construction -- feels otherwise than Mr. Burkhardt. "There is not one more bloody train that is going to run through this town", said Raymond Lafontaine. "Let's not hide under the covers. I am the president of eight companies. In each of those companies, I am the responsible person." 

Mr. Lafontaine is an employer of almost 200 people in Lac Megantic with his road construction companies. He is also now a man who has lost a son, two sisters-in-law and a valued employee as a result of the monumental tragedy this town has suffered.

He points an unforgiving finger of blame at the man whose company is responsible for destroying his town's business centre, its heritage and pride, but above all of depriving him and his family of beloved family members and friends. Carrying flammable cargo, an unattended train was parked on a main track on a slope, slipped its brake system to pick up killing speed, arriving in his town, an unlit black messenger of death.

"I waited for my mother all night", said 19-year-old Billy Turcotte who had escaped the blaze with his girlfriend, only to discover that his mother had been that night at Musi-Cafe. "My mother is like a mother hen; she would have called me right away to let me know she was OK. There was no call."

"We know them all. For us, they are faces, they are not just names", said Richard Turcotte whose daughter Elodie was also at the cafe that night, working. She was 18, preparing to begin her second year at college in Sherbrooke. In the early morning hours of Saturday she had texted her boyfriend to let him know she was almost through for the night. At 1:14 am the explosion occurred.

Her boyfriend telephoned Elodie's parents living on the outskirt of town to alert them of what had occurred. They searched frantically for their daughter. Elodie's mother stood vigil at the hospital: "She was waiting at the hospital for when the first injured arrive to see if our daughter was there. Nobody ever arrived", explained Elodie's father. Picture it.

Raymond Lafontaine, the local construction boss who built his empire from youthful ambition to see it flourish in the fullness of time, only to have the future deliver a dreadful blow of loss of his son, his daughters-in-law, an employee, was terribly hard hit. "I cannot tell you what my heart is feeling. The more you scratch, the more it hurts. As long as I am active and keep moving, I will be able to talk. But the day I stop, I am going to cry all the tears in my body."

This tragedy has been reported world-wide, bespeaking the horror of a disaster striking out of the darkness of a summer night when people were relaxing, anticipating a week-end and down-time with family and friends. Out of the familiar and the trusted came disaster. Who might have imagined that a town that originated with the building of a rail line that linked the country, a town whose equivalent exists everywhere across the land would suddenly and horrifically face such unspeakable calamity?