Quebec Oil Train Derailment Sparks Criminal Probe

Efforts continued Tuesday to stop waves of crude oil spilled in the disaster from reaching the St. Lawrence River, the backbone of the province's water supply.

A few hours before the crash, the same train caught fire in a nearby town, and the engine was shut down — standard operating procedure dictated by the train's owners, Nantes Fire Chief Patrick Lambert said.

Train company chief Burkhardt suggested that shutting off the locomotive to put out the fire might have disabled the brakes.

"The train had the engine shut down by the firemen, they didn't do that for malicious purposes by its what happens," Burkhardt told reporters at the Montreal airport. "The firemen should have roused the locomotive engineer who was in his hotel and taken him to the scene with them. But it's easy to say what should have happened. We're dealing with what happened."

Lambert defended the fire department, saying that the blaze was extinguished within about 45 minutes and that's when firefighters' involvement ended.

"The people from MMA told us, 'That's great — the train is secure, there's no more fire, there's nothing anymore, there's no more danger,'" Lambert said. "We were given our leave, and we left."

Transportation Safety Board investigator Donald Ross said the locomotive's black box has been recovered, and the fire and the chain of events that followed were a "focal point" of the investigation.


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