Death toll in Canadian oil train disaster rises to 13

Link to video: Quebec train crash aftermath ?like a war zone? says Canadian prime minister

The death toll in the oil train derailment in Quebec has been officially increased to 13 while around 40 more remain missing, police said after investigators were finally able to approach near where the runaway train exploded.

Sgt Benoit Richard of the Quebec provincial police said that eight more bodies had been found in the wreckage after conditions improved enough for inspectors to get better access to the charred site two days after the disaster. Police would not say where the bodies were located for fear of upsetting families.

Police are now considering the lakeside town of Lac-M?gantic, in Quebec's eastern township, a crime scene after a 72-car driverless freight train full of crude oil crashed into and pulverised the historic town centre early on Saturday morning.

The remains of 30 to 40 buildings and derailed tanker cars have been off-limits behind police cordons and the search for victims was hampered by the threat that burning tanker cars and their leaked contents, which locals fear leaked into the city's gutters, could cause further explosions.

"The vast majority of fires are out," confirmed S?ret? du Qu?bec officer Jean-Thomas Fortin, and a plan is in place to allow 1,500 of the 2,000 evacuated residents to return home from tomorrow.

Forensic pathologists are on the scene waiting to begin the work of identifying the victims, some of which they fear may have been completely vaporised by the blast, but the ground is still to hot for them to enter the front line of the blast, said Christine Savard, regional co-ordinator for public security.

Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, visited the town on Sunday afternoon and described it in a news conference as looking like a war zone. Around the village residents are still trying to come to terms with the scale.

"Every day there's another person declared missing, another family member not getting a phone call," says Jocelyne Legendre, a 53-year-old woman temporarily sheltered at the local school where the Red Cross and the Salvation Army are tending to the displaced.

She said that there must have been 40 people just at the Musi-Cafe, the local bar where many are feared to have died, "to say nothing of the blocks of people who died in their sleep". She was on her way to the bar that night before a "twist of fate" kept her home.

Mario Gabouri, who was woken by the crash, ran to see what was happening and saw his neighbour blown on to his back on the asphalt by the intensity of the explosion. "It was like a nightmare when you try to run but your limbs are too heavy," he said.

Gabouri, a 53-year-old wood factory worker displaced from his home located in what is now the "red zone", says at least four of his friends and colleagues are missing.

Gabouri alerted police on Saturday morning when he saw boiling green petrol pouring into the Chaudi?re river.

Quebec's environment minister, Yves-Fran?ois Blanchet, told CBC's Quebec AM that he estimated 100,000 litres of oil spilled into the river.

"What we have is a small, very fine, very thin layer of oil which, however, covers almost entirely the river for something like 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Lac-M?gantic to St-Georges-de-Beauce," he said.

The train was carrying heavy crude oil, according to Savard. It had been extracted from the Bekkan shale oil fields in North Dakota and was headed to eastern refineries in New Brunswick, according to Christophe Journet, senior sales marketing and management at Montreal, Maine & Atlantic, the rail company responsible for the track.

Montreal, Maine & Atlantic, said in a press release Sunday evening "Provincial and Federal authorities have taken control of the derailment area" preventing their internal investigation. They believe the locomotive was somehow shut down after the engineer left the train "which may have resulted in the release of air brakes on the locomotive that was holding the train in place."

The soaring global oil prices and the development of new technologies, such as hydraulic fracturing and and tar sands extraction, have caused a controversial bonanza in North American oil production.

According to the Montreal Gazette, Canadian Pacific's revenues per car have risen 12% in the first quarter since last year, thanks to the oil by rail surge, while 12% of Canadian railroad freight is hazardous material.

Serious public opposition to practices such as fracking and tar sands extraction, as well as the building of major pipelines has lead to a hasty surge in the transport of oil by freight.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/09/death-toll-canadian-oil-train-disaster

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