I discovered some new material, related to the role that Canadian government "oversight" (or lack of it) as it related to Transport Canada's mission to see that all the rules and regulations, formulated to see that rail transportation in Canada, would be done while following the rules, was not really done in a very good way at all. In fact if you read this article you will see that oversight of rail operations, and safety rules being followed, was terribly lacking. I contacted MEC407 and showed him what I had found, and said to him that I thought a lot of good people had followed this thread, and should see this new information, I thought, as it is just one more piece of a bigger puzzle. He kindly unlocked the thread and suggested that I post it. Read on.
Surfing the web early this Thanksgiving morning, I came across a news article, regarding the regulatory "oversight" of Canadian Railroads, or more appropriately "lack" of that expected oversight, by Transport Canada, an audit that was completed just "days before" the Lac Megantic disaster.
From that article:
......."OTTAWA -- A rail-safety audit completed just days before the deadly July train crash in Lac-Megantic, Que., found "significant weaknesses" in Transport Canada's oversight of federally regulated railways.
Those weaknesses include a lack of knowledge of rail routes used to transport dangerous goods, too few safety auditors, poorly trained inspectors and an absence of follow-up or sanctions when safety problems are found.
"What we identified was that there were weaknesses in all aspects of how Transport Canada is overseeing rail safety systems in the (rail) companies," auditor general Michael Ferguson told a news conference Tuesday".......
......."His report found that only 14 safety audits of Canada's 31 federally regulated railways had been completed in the previous three years -- just a quarter of the audits Transport Canada had expected to carry out.
Moreover, "the scope of the department's audits is very limited," stated the report"........
And eight of those 14 audits focused on just the two largest operators, CN and Canadian Pacific, leaving Canada's smaller operators largely unchecked"................"and one of those small rail companies was the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic, whose unattended, single-operator train carrying 7.6 million litres of volatile crude oil derailed and exploded in Lac-Megantic on July 6, killing 47 people".......
Link to article:
http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/signific ... -1.1561010" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
In the earlier part of this thread, I mentioned an airline disaster that had happened at Dryden, Ontario, Canada, in March of 1989, one that resulted in 26 deaths. I mentioned this specifically, because of how it was investigated, and what evidence was found during the investigation, and because I thought all of that bore more than a little bit of similarity to Lac Megantic. This crash (Dryden) was the result of several smaller things, combining at that moment in time to bring on disaster. The Canadian safety board did NOT investigate this accident, but rather an investigation was done under the guidance of the Honorable Virgil P. Moshansky. This was done, I believe, in order to be able to take an honest look at the airline regulatory structure in Canada, at the time, and whether or not this may have contributed in some way to the accident.
The report goes on to state that (among other things): ......"competitive pressures caused by commercial deregulation cut into safety standards and that many of the industry’s sloppy practices and questionable procedures placed the pilot in a very difficult situation"........
Sounds very familiar to more than a bit of the discussion we have read concerning Lac Megantic, doesn't it.
You can google search, if interested, and turn up a PDF file of the complete report on the Dryden event, and find more about that disaster.
I think, more than anything else, that the general public has the right to know anything and everythingthat may have contributed to the Lac Megantic disaster. It now seems within the realm of possibility that Transport Canada, the soul agency charged with promulgating the rules that railroads follow when operating in Canada, and seeing that they were followed, and that especially all safety issues were properly monitored, was "asleep at the switch, so to speak. This audit, completed the week before Lac Megantic, pointed out how the "regulators" may well have dropped the ball, and that may have been a contributing factor, to some extent, to the Lac Megantic disaster.
Transport Canada allowed the MMA to operate with one man crews. They say they did not specifically "permit" this, but allowed it by not telling them they couldn't operate that way. Transport Canada did not even know, according to this audit, what railroads were carrying hazmat, over what routes. It seems that those charged with making the regulations, and the oversight of them to see that they are followed, needed to spend more time auditing the lines to make sure that was happening. As has been pointed out, TC did not know, for sure, that MMA was hauling Hazmat with one man crews. In that case, being something quite new, and considering the cargo, it seems that TC should have spent some time monitoring those MMA operations in this area.
What significance this may have had, to the cause of the wreck, remains to be seen, and hopefully, one of these days, the investigators will hopefully tell us.
But it is clear to me that this dreadful laxness, as it came to seeing that railroads operated according to the rules, and that those rules were adequate to ensure safety, as much as possible, surely did not help the situation that night.
This is certainly NOT how the FRA works in this country!
SRM
