The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is calling for an independent public inquiry into last July’s train disaster that killed 47 people and levelled downtown Lac- Mégantic in the province of Quebec. The left-leaning think-tank’s report lists eight key failures by government regulators that it finds contributed to the tragedy.
The runaway train was unmanned and loaded with extremely volatile Bakken crude oil when it began to roll downhill, picking up speed. It jumped the tracks and the cars exploded sending huge balls of flame into the sky.
Listen“The federal government has not publicly acknowledged any culpability or responsibility for the accident, as of now,” says Bruce Campbell, the report’s author and executive director of the CCPA. “On the contrary, the minister has said the cause of the accident is negligence of individuals, not gaps in the regulatory regime.
‘Multiple regulatory failures’
“So what I have done is document and summarize multiple regulatory failure or breaches or blind spots. One or two (would be) okay, but as many as I’ve documented constitute a pattern and it begs the question, was this a case of willful blindness.”
The CCPA concludes the government’s transportation department is responsible for the following problems that contributed to the tragedy:
- Vague rules for railway companies which are often waived or “exempted.”
- Allowance of one-man crews on locomotives.
- Failure to heed years of TSB concerns about the safety of DOT-111 tanker cars.
- Lax testing and disregard for the explosiveness of Bakken crude oil bound for Canada.
- Lack of oversight, audits and enforcement of rail company “safety management systems.”
- Flaws in risk assessment processes and protocols.
- Complacency and lack of regulatory resources in light of a boom in oil-by-rail transport.
- “Cozy” ties to rail industry allowing companies to become too powerful, compromising public safety.
Questions independence of TSB
The CCPA report was released one day before a highly anticipated report on the disaster from the Transportation Safety Board (TSB). Although it is an independent agency created by Parliament, Campbell says it is not fully independent and there “may be a tempering of criticism or a side-stepping or obscuring some of those regulatory issues.” What’s really needed, he says, is a full, independent public inquiry.
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