Kathy Fox still remembers the looks on the faces of the grieving family members on the morning in August 2014, as she tried to explain how the Lac-Megantic rail disaster had happened.
"It was a hard day."
A slew of investigations, court cases, reports and regulatory changes followed over the succeeding decade. Collisions and derailments on main tracks -- which the TSB notes can have the "highest severity" of all rail accidents -- hit three accidents per million train-miles last year.Meanwhile, the volume of dangerous goods on the tracks rose 70 per cent between 2011 and 2019, according to the government's rail traffic database.
"If you give the railways too free a hand, sometimes they make really poor decisions, and they're not penalized for it," said Ian Naish, a rail safety consultant who served as the TSB's director of rail and pipeline investigations between 1998 and 2009. Brazeau said the accident rate for both freight rail and dangerous goods has improved markedly over the past decade.
The slowest pace of change has arguably been around rail signalling -- the trackside lights that authorize various train movements.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Rebuilding Lac-Mégantic: Decade after rail disaster, residents say downtown still a desert | CBC NewsGilles Fluet narrowly escaped death in 2013, leaving the bar where he'd been with friends just moments before a runaway train derailed and exploded nearby. A decade later, he and other residents say what was once a lively downtown still hasn’t fully recovered.
Read more »
A decade after Lac-Mégantic, experts say stricter rules, tougher enforcement neededDespite new penalties and tougher rules around safety management, experts say the current regime is far from sufficient to ensure railways steer clear of another catastrophe
Read more »
'She really is a prodigy,' says skateboard legend Tony Hawk: 10-year-old former Calgarian Reece Nelson qualifies for X-GamesTen-year-old Reece Nelson loves to skateboard.
Read more »
Meet the students who recorded a 'tool for healing' 10 years after Lac-Mégantic's deadly rail disaster | CBC NewsStudents at Notre-Dame-de-Fatima school recorded a song to mark a decade since 47 people were killed when a runaway train derailed and caught fire in their town of Lac-Mégantic, Que., to help the community work through their grief.
Read more »
Letters to the editor: ‘In B.C. … probably the most popular grocer is Trader Joe’s.’ Grocery competition, plus other letters to the editor for July 3In today’s letters to the editor: wildfires; bilingual judges; grocery competition; the Titan submersible; Terry Fox; Canadian comedies
Read more »
A mystery unsolved: Former Edmonton Journal writer remembers colleagues who vanished 50 years agoFifty years ago this June, good friends Terry Pettit and Ronald Yakimchuk packed belongings into the back seat of a beat\u002Dup, 1959 Volkswagen
Read more »