Ten years after Megantic, experts say stricter rules, tougher enforcement needed
CTV
Kathy Fox still remembers the looks on the faces of the grieving family members on the morning in August 2014, as she tried to explain how the Lac-Megantic rail disaster had happened.
Kathy Fox still remembers the looks on the faces of the grieving family members on the morning in August 2014, as she tried to explain how the Lac-Megantic rail disaster had happened.
"You can imagine the grief, the shock, the anger, all the emotions," Fox recalled.
"It was a hard day."
The Transportation Safety Board chair was in the school auditorium to deliver the agency's report on the tragedy -- and the failures that allowed an unattended train carrying 72 tankers full of crude oil to careen off the rails at over 100 km/h, bursting into flames in the heart of the lakeside community on July 6, 2013.
Forty-seven people were killed in the inferno, creating the worst rail accident in modern Canadian history.
The fire, which burned for two days before finally being quelled by the efforts of some thousand firefighters, wiped out much of the centre of the 6,000-person town.
A slew of investigations, court cases, reports and regulatory changes followed over the succeeding decade.
Admitted serial killer Jeremy Skibicki’s defence lawyers have argued the accused had a history of schizophrenic delusions culminating in ‘catastrophic circumstances,’ while Crown prosecutors say the killings of four vulnerable Indigenous women were driven by Skibicki’s racist views and deviant sexual urges.