'What we've got on the tracks today are bombs.' Many residents say Lac-Mégantic was only a matter of time

In the early morning of July 6, 2013, six million litres of crude oil ignited in downtown Lac-Mégantic, Que., when a train rolled downhill and derailed. Forty-seven lives were lost, and many say it was only a matter of time before such a disaster happened.  

"Trains used to carry life," says Robert Bellefleur, a resident of Lac-Mégantic. "But what we've got on the tracks today are bombs."

Lac-Mégantic - This is Not an Accident, a four-part series, investigates one of the worst rail disasters in Canadian history, a foreseeable catastrophe caused by corporate and political negligence.

The train in question was a ticking time bomb. 

When it left North Dakota about six days earlier, documents were falsified to label its cargo as the "least dangerous" oil. Along its route, broken oil tankers were removed due to faulty brakes.

The locomotive pulling the load was broken and had even caught fire while sitting uphill from Lac-Mégantic earlier that night. 

"By the time the train starts to roll towards Mégantic," says writer and activist Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny in the documentary, "it has breached the following safety measures: 

• The safety data sheets have been falsified. 
• It's carrying extremely dangerous goods on [Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway's] broken tracks. 
• The tankers are known to be too fragile. 
• It's a one-person crew. The engineer is uninformed that his train is broken.
• The train sits on the main track, on a slope. There's no emergency derail on the tracks.
• MM&A prohibits using the automatic brakes. 
• [The train engineer's] immobilization test is non-compliant. 
• Too few manual brakes were applied. 
• Employees are afraid of being penalized if they refuse to obey company orders."

The tragedy that happened that night was a culmination of these factors, all of which were overlooked by the rail company and approved or tolerated by Transport Canada. 

In Lac-Mégantic, the director asks Richard Labrie, a former MM&A employee and the rail traffic controller that night, "To anchor, by yourself, a train carrying 10,000 tons of crude oil on the main track, on a slope, with no safety derail, while leaving the locomotive running — was that normal procedure?"

"According to MM&A? Yes," replies Labrie.

"Mégantic wasn't an accident," says Saint-Cerny. "It was a tragedy. A predictable tragedy that should have been prevented. That's exactly what the coroner writes in the 47 reports about the deaths in Mégantic. 

'This was a preventable death.'"