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It also recommended carriers perform route planning and analysis and advocated mandated emergency response plans. While TSB set no clear deadlines, Irving Oil plans to replace the remainder of its own fleet of DOT-111's by the end of April 2014 and ask its suppliers to modernise by the year's end. Quebec City mayor Régis Labeaume has offered that city's continued support for the reconstruction effort (the city already has emergency workers on-site) and called for the immediate construction of 1–2 km of new track to reconnect Lac-Mégantic's industrial park to the rails, bypassing the damaged downtown. Quebec City has also sent an expert from its museum of civilisation to identify artefacts in the wreckage which should be preserved for inclusion in a future monument, memorial park or exhibit. The SQ investigated the MMA railway offices in Farnham, Quebec, on July 25, with a warrant and planned to seize evidence about the fatal event. ] whether the SQ has plans to broaden the scope of their investigation to include, for example, the broker at World Fuel Services who chose to employ deficient DOT-111 tank cars.
Grace was also the last survivor of the sinking and died in St. Catharines, Ontario, on 15 May 1995 at the age of 87. Amongst the dead were the English dramatist and novelist Laurence Irving and his wife Mabel Hackney; the explorer Henry Seton-Karr; Ella Hart-Bennett, the wife of British government official William Hart-Bennett; and Gabriel J. Marks, the first mayor of Suva, Fiji, along with his wife Marion. Lieutenant Charles Lindsay Claude Bowes-Lyon, a first cousin of the future Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother survived the disaster, but died in combat only five months later on the Western Front near Ypres.
Contamination of land
According to initial claims made by the railway, the engineer who left the train unattended went to the explosion zone and uncoupled the last 9 undamaged tank cars that were still on the tracks at the end of the derailment. After uncoupling the tank cars, he used a rail car mover to pull them away from the derailment site. This version of events has been disputed by Lac-Mégantic's fire chief, who indicated that a volunteer firefighter had used a rail car mover borrowed from a local factory to remove these cars from danger. It was later revealed that two employees of Tafisa (Serge Morin, Sylvain Grégoire), a firefighter (Benoît Héon), the MMA engineer and a member of the family-owned excavation company Lafontaine and Son had worked to move 9 tank cars away from the fire. Tafisa, a local particleboard industry that moves much of its product by rail, has a rail car mover which has the capability to deactivate the brakes on the cars it tows.
Lac-Mégantic mayor Colette Roy-Laroche sought assistance from federal and provincial governments to move the trains away from the downtown, a proposal opposed by the railway due to cost, and asked tourists not to abandon the region. MMA announced that it intends to make future crew changes in Sherbrooke so that trains are no longer left unattended; that city's mayor Bernard Sévigny expressed concern that this merely shifts the hazard into the centre of Quebec's sixth-largest city. Teamsters Canada Rail Conference vice-president Doug Finnson disputed this theory, stating that the key braking system on a stopped, unsupervised train are the hand brakes, which are completely independent from the motor-powered compressor that feeds the air brakes.
Sale Type
Damage sustained by Storstad after its collision with Empress of Ireland. Formal portrait of Captain Henry Kendall, the final captain of Empress of Ireland. S length was 570 ft overall and 548.9 ft (167.3 m) between perpendiculars.
Morin, aided by his colleague Grégoire, used the rail car mover to move the first 5 tank cars away from the fire. When they could not find a level crossing to move the rail car mover back to the disaster site, they used a loader to remove another 4 tank cars, 2 at a time. Because the loader lacked equipment to deactivate railcar brakes, Harding told the men to use the loader to break the air lines on cars to release the air brakes on each of these four cars. Lafontaine's workers hauled gravel to the site, created firebreaks and blocked manholes as burning oil spread into the town's storm sewer system. People on the terrace at Musi-Café—a bar located next to the centre of the explosions—saw the tank cars leave the track and fled as a blanket of oil generated a ball of fire three times the height of the downtown buildings.
Derailment and explosion
Shipment of the oil was contracted to CPR, which transported it on CPR tracks from North Dakota to the CPR yard in Côte-Saint-Luc, a Montreal suburb. CPR sub-contracted MMA to transport the oil from the CPR yard in Côte-Saint-Luc to the MMA yard in Brownville Junction. CPR also sub-contracted NBSR to transport it from the MMA yard in Brownville Junction to the final destination at the Saint John refinery.
However, there were no rules against leaving a train unlocked, running and unattended, even if it contained dangerous materials and was stopped on the main line, on a slope, in the vicinity of a residential area. Harding contacted the rail traffic controller in Farnham to advise them that the train was secure. Next, he contacted the rail traffic controller in Bangor, Maine, to report that the lead locomotive had experienced mechanical difficulties throughout the trip and that excessive black and white smoke was coming from its smoke stack. Expecting the smoke to settle, they agreed to deal with the situation the following morning.
Also on the shelter deck were the second class smoke room, located at the aft end of the deck and designed in a similar but simpler fashion as what was seen in first class, with built-in sofas lining the outer walls and an adjacent bar. At the forward end of the deck, beneath the aft mast was the second class entrance, with a staircase running down two decks to the main deck. Aft of the main landing was the second class social hall, laid out in a fashion similar to the smoke room and provided with a piano, while forward of the entrance was the second class dining room, large enough to seat 256 passengers at one serving.
The disaster has drawn criticisms of federal deregulation of the rail industry in Canada. Leaders of two federal opposition parties, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois, have called for Parliament to examine rail safety in Canada with possible implementation of stricter regulation. The Conservative Party has opposed a critical review of Transport Canada's oversight of the railways, Millions of dollars budgeted to Transport Canada for rail safety in fiscal years 2011–12 and 2012–13 remain unspent. Maine's US representatives Michaud and Pingree proposed The Safe Freight Act, a federal bill requiring two-person crews on freight trains, and are demanding the older DOT-111 design be replaced by sturdier cars for dangerous goods shipments.
The conclusion of the programme was that both captains failed to abide by the condition that, on encountering fog, ships should maintain their heading, although the captain of Storstad deviated only after seeing the deviation of Empress of Ireland. In the film, water tank replication of the incident indicated that Empress of Ireland could not have been stationary at the point of the collision. It also indicated—through underwater observations of the ship's Engine order telegraph in the engine room—that Kendall's assertion that he gave the order to close watertight doors was probably not true.
For example, was Empress of Ireland sufficiently and efficiently officered and manned? (Q.4); after the vessels had sighted each other's lights did the atmosphere between them become foggy or misty, so that lights could no longer be seen? If so, did both vessels comply with SOLAS Articles 15 and 16, and did they respectively indicate on their steam whistles or sirens, the course or courses they were taking by the signals set out?
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