Railway: Brakes not set properly in Canada train crash

A lone engineer failed to set brakes properly on a train that derailed and exploded in a small Canadian town, killing at least 15 people, the railway's chairman said Wednesday. "Adequate hand brakes were not set on this train and it was the engineer's responsibility to set them," Edward Burkhardt, chairman of the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, said while visiting the scene of the accident. Had the hand brakes been properly applied, he told reporters, "we wouldn't have had this incident." A massive blaze sparked by the crash on Saturday tore through homes and businesses, razing part of Lac-Megantic, a town of 6,000 located east of Montreal near the US border. The inferno forced about 2,000 residents to flee their homes, though many of them started returning on Tuesday. The freight train had been stopped for a crew change in the nearby town of Nantes when it began to roll downhill without a conductor towards Lac-Megantic, several kilometers away. It derailed at a curve in the tracks and several cars exploded. Burkhardt previously blamed firefighters in Nantes for the disaster, saying they unwittingly unlocked the train's air brakes when they shut down the main locomotive's engines to douse a small unrelated fire hours before the Lac-Megantic disaster. He clarified Wednesday that the shutdown of the air brakes "was an important causal factor in this whole thing." But he added, "The fact that when the air brakes released on the locomotive and the train ran away would indicate that the hand brakes were not properly applied." "I don't think any employee removed brakes that were set. I think (the MMA employee) failed to set the brakes in the first place," he said. "We think (the engineer) applied some hand brakes. The question is did he apply enough of them. He told us that he applied 11 hand brakes (on the rail cars). And our feeling now is that that is not true. Initially we took him at his word." Burkhardt also said that he feels the Nantes firefighters had done "what they thought was correct" in turning off the locomotive's engines. An MMA track foreman called to the scene of the Nantes flare-up, he said, was aware they had turned off the engine but was unfamiliar with the operation of diesel locomotives, and so "wasn't aware of the consequences that would come from that." The track foreman informed the company train dispatcher but by then it was too late to get anyone to the scene to restart the locomotive and prevent its deadly slide into Lac-Megantic. "There was very little time actually, we're talking minutes, and it's pretty hard to see how they could have gotten somebody to the scene that could have restarted this locomotive and prevented this thing," Burkhardt said. The engineer has been suspended without pay while he is under investigation. "I don't think he'll be back working for us. That is my personal opinion," Burkhardt said. Part of the disaster zone remained off-limits as police and federal transportation officials combed through the smoldering debris for evidence, while Quebec announced Can$60 million (US$57 million) for emergency aid and reconstruction. "This should never have happened," Quebec Premier Pauline Marois told a press conference. Earlier Burkhardt faced angry residents when he arrived in Lac-Megantic to survey the devastation and speak with Red Cross volunteers. A 40-year-old man in a t-shirt and shorts shouted "assassin" at him while a young girl who lost her cousin in the fire told AFP: "I just wanted to see his face, I have a lot of anger." "Everyone in town knows someone who died," she said. Burkhardt offered condolences and apologies. He said the company was following standard industry practices when it left its train on a track unattended, but said rail rules could be beefed up and the company would no longer leave its trains unattended. "I feel absolutely awful about this," he said. "I am devastated by what's occurred in this community. I have never been involved in anything remotely approaching this in my whole life." "This company is going to respond to this tragedy as best it can," he said. And eventually, he added, "we'll clean up the wrecked cars and build the track back and start to roll trains through here again -- very carefully, I might tell you."