Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

In an interview with CBC Radio, the president of Rail World, Ed Burkhardt, whom the residents of Lac-Megantic simply loathe, bemoaned the tragedy that was brought to the old railway town by his company's Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway. He spoke of how the dreadful accident has impacted so deleteriously on his company, along with the town's residents. And took umbrage when the CBC interviewer asked for a clarification; upbraiding her for 'putting words in his mouth' when she did no such thing. He put his foot in his mouth himself, equating the fiscal problems that have descended on his company with the tragic deaths of 47 people.

While one percent of the total population of Lac Megantic met their untimely death as a result of MM&A's crude oil-carrying tank cars careening driverless down a slope into the town at break-neck speed, derailing, exploding, destroying all in its wake, the president of the company bridles with sensitivity over a 'misunderstanding' of what he said. When what he said was clear enough. The tragedy that brought an unforgivable atrocity to the town may yet be the cause of his company's descent into bankruptcy.

Moral bankruptcy begets financial bankruptcy.

Lac Megantic's mayor, Colette Roy-Laroche, had the town's lawyers contact the railroad company reminding them of their moral and practical obligations in cleaning up the unimaginable blight they've brought to the landscape. Although MM&A contacted and tasked professional site cleaners to the area, no financing of their work ever took place on their part. It was left to the town to fund the $4-million-and-counting to ensure that those companies remain on site, performing the needed environmental clean-up.

Rail World has been unreceptive to the demands from the municipality. But its president has indicated that the company's financial shape is wobbly, it does not have the financing at hand to pay for its obligatory role in clean-up. It has appealed to its insurers, in the hope that they will be forthcoming in bailing the company out of its dilemma. It is a dilemma that object short-sightedness has caused. According to a U.S. railway consultant, Rail World approached him in 2004 to explore whether his company might launch training sessions for MM&A's employees.

The railway, however, was not amenable to paying the fee of $25,000. And when Rick Carter, founder of Railroad Training Services in California offered a reduced quote of $17,600 as a fee, Tom Tancula, Rail World vice-president mechanical responded: "We're not going to pay that much money to train these people", recalled Mr. Carter in an interview. This represented vital training; proper airbrake and handbrake safety procedures. The very procedures that have been focused upon as having been found lacking by the investigators of the tragedy.

The safety training for MM&A employees would have comprised of, among other matters, how to safely park a crude oil-hauling train similar to the one that ran out of control into Lac Megantic. A train of that size should have had handbrakes applied on all five of its locomotives along with ten to fifteen of its railcars as a roll-away preventive. Mr. Burkhardt denies any knowledge of those negotiations with Mr. Carter's company. In any event, he insisted, MM&A employees were adequately trained on required safety procedures, in-house or by third-party consultants.

As for the future of his company, he acknowledged the possibility that MM&A may not survive in the aftermath of the accident. Everything was "under review". Rail World "was looking at a number of options. We've already had a considerable outlay of cash, so the additional sums will have to come from the insurance companies. We can only do so much. We're not sitting on millions of dollars." Mere millions of dollars, in fact, will not restore life to 47 people. Nor will it restore the town centre of Lac Megantic to what it had been.

The aftermath of a mammoth disaster is a daunting prospect to contemplate. How much simpler it might have been for an initial reasonable outlay of funds that would ensure employees of the railroad fully understood their professional obligations and the consequences of not following fail-safe procedures.

news.nationalpost.com