Lac-Mégantic — A Runaway Oil Train, Seven Handbrakes, 47 Dead

Shortly before 01:15 on 6 July 2013, an unattended Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA) freight train carrying Bakken crude oil rolled away from where it had been parked overnight on a descending grade at Nantes, Quebec, ran roughly 7.2 miles downhill gathering speed to about 65 mph, and derailed in the centre of the town of Lac-Mégantic. Sixty-three tank cars left the rails, many were breached, and the released crude ignited in fires and explosions that killed 47 people and destroyed much of the downtown core. It remains one of the deadliest rail disasters in modern Canadian history and the deadliest involving a runaway.

The train — MMA-002 — was a unit train of 72 Class 111 tank cars carrying approximately 7.7 million litres of petroleum crude oil, plus a buffer car, hauled by five locomotives. It had been left for the night at Nantes by a single operating employee, under MMA’s single-person train operation. The lead locomotive had a history of mechanical trouble; a substandard engine repair allowed oil to accumulate in the turbocharger, which overheated and caught fire after the train was parked. Firefighters shut the engine down, as their protocols required. With the lead locomotive off, the air compressor that kept the brake system charged stopped running. Over the following hour the air slowly leaked away, the brake cylinders lost their grip, and the seven handbrakes that had been set were not enough to hold the train on the grade. It began to roll.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) investigated under file R13D0054 and released its report on 19 August 2014. It did not reduce the catastrophe to a single mistake: it identified 18 distinct causes and contributing factors and located the failure in the operating company and its oversight — a weak safety culture at MMA, inadequate training and supervision, insufficient handbrakes never properly tested, the practice of leaving a loaded dangerous-goods train unattended on a main-line grade, the absence of any additional physical defence against a runaway, and gaps in Transport Canada’s oversight. The Finding is therefore Operator — organizational and oversight failure — not the act of any one employee.

The legal reckoning ran for years and ended without a criminal conviction of the individuals charged. Three former MMA employees were tried on 47 counts each of criminal negligence causing death and acquitted by a jury in January 2018. Separately, MMA and several former employees pleaded guilty to federal regulatory offences; the engineer received a conditional sentence served in the community, and fines were imposed against the bankrupt company. The disaster reshaped North American rules for crude-by-rail, train securement, and tank-car design.