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Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
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I post this, as I know a lot of participants from Toronto or Ottawa will go to the CO and CYCC by train. The train station is directly under the hotel. Some round-trip tickets between Toronto or Ottawa and Montreal sell for as low as $60!
From Williams Lake it's costing $1700 by air. Via Rail is way out there and we would have to travel 3 hours to catch it. The provincial and federal government's have successfully dismantled public train service in rural B.C..
That is an unfair and inflammatory statement about that happened in Lac-Megantic. Tell us which regulations were removed that resulted in those deaths?
Futhermore the original comments were about passenger trains, and you have now mixed it with freight. Not the same.
That is an unfair and inflammatory statement about that happened in Lac-Megantic. Tell us which regulations were removed that resulted in those deaths?
Futhermore the original comments were about passenger trains, and you have now mixed it with freight. Not the same.
Thanks for making excuses for this most sinister regime.
Dogs will bark, but the caravan of chess moves on.
For the record, I am not a fan of the present Federal Government. However I also don't believe in persons stating falsehoods.
For the record, I am also not an employee of the rail industry, although for full disclosure by grandfather and uncle worked for CN rail, first in NFLD, later in New Brunswick.
You are stating that the disaster in Lac-Megantic is the result of deregulation of the rail industry, as implement by the Government. I challenge you to back your statement with facts.
I post this, as I know a lot of participants from Toronto or Ottawa will go to the CO and CYCC by train. The train station is directly under the hotel. Some round-trip tickets between Toronto or Ottawa and Montreal sell for as low as $60!
Yes $60 return is a good price. I went by bus to Montreal in May 2013 and it cost $109 return.
Presumably the same rate is available for Montreal - Toronto return. I'm thinking some of the Montreal players might want to come for the June 14, 15 weekend for the Rapid (see thread this page) and the $1,000 First Prize Blitz tourney put on by the Annex Chess Club the next day.
I see $39 from Toronto to Montreal using the escape fares.
It's $39 each way - thus $78 return
The fine print says >>>>> *One-way fare in Economy class, excluding sales taxes. The number of seats is limited. Fares may vary based on selected day of week and time of departure.
I challenge you to back your statement with facts.
Here's a very good article by Bruce Campbell of the CCPA that completely confirms what I've claimed. Read your heart out.
May 20, 2014
Last week, 10 months after disaster struck the town of Lac-Mégantic, Québec government prosecutors laid criminal charges against three front-line employees of Montréal Maine and Atlantic Railway (MMA).
Each suspect, paraded publicly in handcuffs in a classic U.S. style “perp walk,” was charged with 47 counts of criminal negligence causing death.
Residents reacted with disbelief at the travesty of the bankrupt MMA, which was also charged and only faces fines if convicted. Its senior executives, directors, and owners have escaped prosecution while the three employees face life behind bars.
For those hoping to achieve justice through the criminal courts, this is a cautionary tale.
The producers who loaded their explosive Bakken oil onto unsafe tank cars face no charges.
The shippers who wrongly classified it as low volatility when it was, in reality, a much higher volatility gasoline-like product, face no charges. Neither do the Canadian importers who were obligated to ensure that it was properly classified.
They could be prosecuted for improper classification under the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, but Transport Canada has revealed little about the status of its criminal investigation. Here too, the result is likely to be disappointing.
Civil actions underway—a wrongful death suit in U.S. court by the victims’ families, and the class-action suit on behalf of the town’s citizens—reach much further up the pyramid of accountability, with the latter involving more than 50 defendants.
Transport Canada is among the class action defendants, though the prospect of it being found responsible is remote.
These processes may bring partial resolution to the community, though they will take years and will likely result in settlements before any verdict is reached.
Further up the accountability pyramid, senior Canadian and U.S. transport officials, along with oil and rail industry executives, dragged their feet for years on replacing the old DOT-111 tank cars. They’d been warned multiple times from their own transportation safety boards that DOT-111 tank cars were prone to puncture and should not be used for transporting hazardous goods.
At the time of the accident, more than 80 per cent of the tank cars carrying crude oil in North America—including all 72 cars on the Lac-Mégantic train—were this older defective model.
It took until just a few weeks ago for Transport Canada to order the elimination of all old DOT-111 tank cars used for the transport of crude oil… by May 2017.
Where does responsibility lie for the enormous regulatory lapse that allowed MMA to operate its oil trains with one-person crews, a factor that Transport Canada itself admitted, “contributed to the accident and magnified its consequences.”
A 2009 Transportation Safety Board report warned: “when only one crew member is left to complete train securement tasks at the end of a work shift, the risk for runaway equipment is increased, because there is no opportunity for other crew members to identify and correct any errors.”
A recent Radio Canada investigation by Enquête shed light on the behind-the-scenes maneuvering at Transport Canada. MMA applied to Transport Canada in 2009 for permission to operate with one-person crews as it was doing across the border in Maine. Officials at the Montreal office opposed this request because of the company’s history of safety violations and the potential danger to communities.
A year later, a Transport Canada audit of MMA revealed major deficiencies in its performance and procedures, including with train inspections and brake tests.
MMA returned with the same request in 2011, and again the Montreal office balked. MMA complained to the industry lobby, the Railway Association of Canada (RAC). A senior RAC official promised to “make some calls.”
The Steelworkers union—in collective bargaining with MMA at the time—also strenuously opposed one-person crews. However, the government mediator told the union negotiator that this was not a bargaining issue since the decision was Transport Canada’s to make.
Over all these objections, MMA was granted its wish in May 2012.
At the apex of the accountability pyramid are the political leaders who put in place and maintain the regulatory regime. They set the tone, expectations and guidelines for the regulators. They choose the senior managers to administer the regime, and determine the regulatory bodies’ budgets.
On paper the regulatory regime—which gives the companies primary responsibility for establishing and implementing their own safety management systems within a framework of strong government rules, oversight and enforcement—may be sound.
However, if those rules are too vague. Or if companies are regularly granted exemptions. If the relationship between regulator and regulated is too cozy. Or if, as three Auditor General reports have found, Transport Canada is not able to provide the necessary oversight and enforcement—then it becomes effectively self-regulation.
Add to the mix a company like MMA, determined to take advantage of these regulatory gaps in its pursuit of profit, and a catastrophic accident is only a matter of when, not if.
Policy makers are also responsible for setting the budgets at a level sufficient to ensure public safety.
The Transportation of Dangerous Goods (TDG) division’s annual budget of $14 million has remained frozen since 2010. The rail safety directorate budget, currently $34 million, was cut in by 19 per cent between 2010 and 2014. The number of inspectors has remained the same for the last 10 years.
With only 35 TDG inspectors to handle the exponential growth in volume of oil by rail, the number of tank carloads of crude oil per TDG inspector has risen from 14 in 2009 to 4500 in 2013. With the volume expected to double by the end of this year, that number rises to 9000.
To illustrate how small these budgets are in comparison with the companies being regulated, their combined budgets are less than the 2012 compensation received by Hunter Harrison, the CEO of Canadian Pacific. His compensation package was over $49 million that year.
Finally, policy makers establish the regulatory culture. The Conservative government’s approach to regulatory policy, directed from the Treasury Board, is embodied in its incessant use of the pejorative term “red tape”, which implies that regulations are burdens on business rather than a legal mechanism to protect the public interest. The so-called one-for-one policy mandates that every new regulation must be offset by the removal of an existing one.
Assessment of a proposed regulation’s impact is supposed to include a calculation of benefits along with costs—as well as its impact on health, safety as well as the impact on the environment, on vulnerable groups, etc. In practice, impact is determined almost entirely by anticipated costs, most of which are short-term costs to business. Moreover, significant regulatory proposals generally do not move forward without the nod from the Prime Minister’s Office.
Such a regulatory culture emanating from the top infects attitudes, procedures and practices in all regulatory agencies.
The Transportation Safety Board investigation, due in a couple of months, will likely produce important revelations about the accident’s causes. But it is hard to imagine that it will target those at the upper levels of the accountability pyramid.
So while then-Transport Minister Lebel gets shuffled to another portfolio, and senior bureaucrats in charge of the file are moved or retired; while company executives and owners evade prosecution; while it’s largely business as usual in oil-by-rail transportation— three scapegoated workers at the bottom of the pyramid face the possibility of life in prison.
The people of Lac-Mégantic entrusted government to take reasonable measures to ensure their safety. Their trust was betrayed. They deserve to know the truth behind the corporate negligence and regulatory failure for which they paid such a heavy price.
On the night of July 5-6, 2013, an un-crewed runaway crude oil train derailed and exploded in the center of the town of Lac Mégantic, killing 47 people.
A heavily redacted version of the police document was given up in February of this year. The Gazette's Monique Beaudin reports in a June 16 article on the content of the full document. We learn in the uncensored version (French language):
• An insufficient number of handbrakes - seven - were applied by the train engineer, Thomas Harding, when he stationed the 73-wagon train late on July 5 and retired for the night in a local motel. An expert report prepared for the SQ (the police) estimates that hand brakes should have been applied to at least 15 wagons and to the five locomotives. Company guidelines called for handbrakes on nine wagons in that length of train.
• One locomotive was left to idle overnight by Harding in order to hold the train's air brakes. But it was in serious disrepair and was a serious fire hazard because it was spewing lubricating oil from its exhaust.
• That locomotive caught fire at approximately 11:30 PM, July 5. Local volunteer firefighters arrived to extinguish the fire. In the course of doing so, they shut down the faulty locomotive. That left the air brake pressure to slowly dissipate.
• An MMA employee who inspected the train was the last to leave it that night, just before 1 AM - unattended and with all the locomotives shut off. The employee was not qualified to inspect the train and decide how to leave it. Shortly after he left, the train began its deadly journey.
• Harding had offered to company officials to oversee the shutdown of the train after the fire was extinguished, but was told he wasn't needed.
• The MMA's track and rolling equipment were seriously degraded and neglected. Company and Transport Canada officials examined the wagons of the fateful train earlier on July 5, but they didn't inspect the locomotives. The MMA's railway-equipment inspection manager told police the company had only three track maintenance employees and did not have enough materials to properly maintain the network.
Beaudin reported in The Gazette the following day that MMA employees told police they feared a catastrophe due to the poor conditions of the company's tracks and equipment and the petroleum products it was carrying. Instead of repairing deteriorated tracks, for example, the MMA would instead lower authorized speeds, to as low as 5 mph on some stretches of its line! MMA's tracks passed Transport Canada inspections.
Dogs will bark, but the caravan of chess moves on.
Re: Lac-Mégantic - Suppressing the Truth Behind Regulatory Failure
Supplemental: the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), a US Department of Transportation agency, is drafting regulations to improve the safety of rail shipments of crude oil following catastrophic accidents that led to massive casualties in previous years.
It looks like the industry is well represented, although it's not clear if the public is being properly protected; so far, officials of the railroad, oil, ethanol, and chemical industries have met 13 times at the White House and the PHMSA since March, each pushing their own policy.
“It was astonishing to learn of how long it has been known that this tanker train easily explodes when derailed. Please be the one who acts to remove these tankers permanently and see that they are replaced with tankers that are designed to far higher standards of safety,” Trudy McDaniel of South Orange, New Jersey said in comments filed with PHMSA.
Railroads generally do not own tank cars; the vast majority of them are owned or leased by rail customers. The oil and ethanol industries that own the cars want to continue to follow the voluntary standards for tank cars, known as ‘1232’ tank cars. These are the cars that exploded when derailed, killing so many people in Lac-Mégantic on that terrible day.
Dogs will bark, but the caravan of chess moves on.
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