
Unleashed by the train crash, flaming bitumen oil spread into every fissure, every crack. Waves of fire flowed through the streets and people, who just minutes before were carelessly enjoying a quiet summer night. They had no escape. The residents of Lac-Mégantic were trapped, even if they hadn’t realized it yet. Some ran toward the lake thinking the water would quench the fire, that if only they could make it, they would be saved. But the oil spill had already ignited the surface of the lake and it burned with the same intensity as the scene they sought to escape. The oil had found its way into the sewers and down into the rainwater drainage pipes that split off in a V-like shape, and empty directly into the lake. The burning oil spread out across the water’s surface, the heat so intense it cracked rocks on the shoreline. Millions of liters were spilled from the 72 derailed oil tankers, most of it burned off in the ensuing inferno but hundreds of thousands of litres flowed freely and coated the streets, lake, and river. Those who didn’t die instantly in the explosion were trapped; behind them was the blast zone inferno of the derailed oil-cars and before them a lake of flames like an ocean of napalm.
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On the night of the train wreck, Claude was safely beyond the reach of the spilling oil and spreading inferno. But Lac-Mégantic is small—so all of the townspeople lost a friend or family member in that fire. Some lost a lot more than just one. Claude told me about a cab driver who left his home, his wife, and his children to drive a fare. He’d done that a hundred times before. But while he was away, the oil tank cars were barreling downhill—gliding down iron rails. The train drove directly into the heart of the town. He never saw his family again.While I surveyed the blast zone I imagined the 40 buildings that once stood. Two and three-storey low-rises with ground floor businesses and apartments above flanked the road’s sides. Downtown Lac-Mégantic is mostly centred around Rue Frontenac, one long straight road that, if you’re standing by the railroad tracks, leads into a grassy hill and tree line. Now it was mostly loose dirt, peppered with stacks of shattered cement and random debris. Only the train tracks were left, dividing the crater into off-kilter hemispheres of destruction. It’s poetic in a way; the town’s centre was destroyed, but the train tracks remain.
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The new owners promise a host of improvements, including the abolition of single-man crews, which has been widely reported to be a key factor in the train’s derailment. At this point I’m not even sure what I want to see happen. It would be nice to see Ed Burkhardt—the man in charge of MMA when that train exploded—chased through the streets along with the board of directors from the defunct MMA railway, but it wouldn’t solve anything. No lives will be brought back through scapegoating or mob retribution. There’s a pang of impotence and futility when I think about what should be done. Oil transport by railway has exponentially increased in recent years, and volcanic derailments have followed suit. When nothing substantial changes in the face of a failure as great as this—if in the moment of crisis we still can’t change our direction—what hope is there?On my walk back to my uncle’s I stopped by the cemetery. I’m not sure why exactly. Maybe I wanted to find the graves of the 47 who died in the fire or maybe I was just feeling morbid after walking through a disaster zone. I found a couple fresh graves but none of them made mention of the train derailment. I guess once you’re buried it doesn’t really matter why. It was a quiet space—clean and presentable—but haunted, and surprisingly similar to the fenced-off wreckage of downtown Lac-Mégantic. Tombstones were decorated with flowers and pillowy clouds hung in the sky above. I was just a short distance from ground zero, but the wreckage was completely gone from sight. It was like it didn’t exist, save for the faint taste of oil in the air. Life moves on, and though the clean up will stretch on for years to come, it’s not as if all of Lac-Mégantic was erased in a fireball.The loss of Lac-Mégantic, and the spills that continue to crop up around Canada, are a heavy price to pay as the tar sands continue to ship oil. Oil is an old technology, and the pollution from it is killing our planet. Over and over again we commit ourselves to a product that is leading us to doom. We’re captured by comfort and counseled against change—without the oil sands Canada’s economy would lose an estimated $2.1 trillion in “economic benefits,” according to Deloitte, over the next 25 years.While government officials love to tout GDP increases as evidence of the benefits the tar sands offer, a significant chunk of that will go to cleaning up environmental disasters like Lac-Megantic. And while hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent to remove the toxic mess, no amount of GDP can ever return Lac-Mégantic to what it once was: an idyllic, peaceful town like so many in rural Canada. Even if the town is physically rebuilt, the emotional scars of its residents and nightmarish memories of that horrible night in July remain, leaving yet another casualty in our seemingly unending thirst for oil.