Justice for Lac Megantic

July 11, Citizens for a Clean Harbor held a benefit for the Harding Labrie Defense Fund, and raised $135. Thank you to everyone involved!

Donate now to help ensure a vigorous 

and fair legal defense

For background on the case, listen to this radio interview from Your Rights at Work! via Pacifica Radio

Herbert Harris Jr (Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers &
Trainmen) reports on a local fundraiser to support Canadian rail workers being blamed for management’s mistakes in the 2013 Lac Megantic disaster.

Interview begins at 14.40

Our own Donna Albert sang this song for us.

Special thanks go to Fritz Edler of Railroad Workers United, for all his help and insightful discussion via Skype.

The Evidence is in: The Train Crew did not Cause the Lac-Mégantic Tragedy

Music Benefit for Lac-Mégantic Rail Worker Defense a great success!

Over $1700 raised kicking off fund drive for defense of the scapegoated rail workers and fighting for safe rails everywhere.

via The Harding Defense Fund

How many more have to die?

July 6th this year marks four years since a runaway train carrying volatile Bakken crude crashed and burned in the small town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 and destroying half the town. It’s time to recommit to making sure tragedies like this don’t happen again. It’s also the right time to speak up against the criminal trial beginning September 11th this year, that unfairly and inaccurately hangs the Lac-Mégantic crash on two railroad workers, Tom Harding and Richard Labrie.

Railroad managers push hard to squeeze every dollar they can out of every train run. The Lac-Mégantic train had a dangerous cargo, overlong train, defective equipment, a single crew-member and work rules that cut the margin of safety down to just about zero. The result was a disaster that still impacts the Lac-Mégantic community.

Multiple government safety investigations and independent journalists looked at what happened in Lac-Mégantic and came to the same conclusion. Railroad management policies made this kind of runaway train crash likely to happen sooner or later. Lax government oversight looked the other way until it did.

You would think that four years later there would be stronger safety regulations on every railroad, with extra layers of protection for dangerous cargo. Sadly, this is not the case. Railroad policymakers are still cutting corners and government regulators are still looking the other way. They want people to believe that the big safety problem is a few careless railroad workers.  But in Lac-Mégantic, SINCE the wreck, the supposedly safely restored wreck curve has now deteriorated and keeps that community at risk.  Everyone there tightens up when a train passes now.

Even after all the reports and exposes, the Canadian and Quebec governments are still not going after the railroad policy makers and their unsafe policies. The managers who made the critical policies will not even get a slap on the wrist. That’s just wrong, and it guarantees that the danger continues. Every year since the crash, the number of reported runaway trains in Canada has increased. That’s a sign of a reckless culture, not the actions of two rail-road workers one night in Quebec.

Whether your main issue is the environment, community safety, rail safety, or worker’s rights, it comes down to stronger government regulations and stronger railroad safety policies, with real community and labor enforcement. The two railroad workers were not the cause of the Lac-Mégantic crash or any of the runaway trains since then. They are not the ones still running trains right through the town of Lac-Mégantic, ignoring the demands of the survivors for a simple rail bypass. The people in Lac-Mégantic know that sending Harding and Labrie to prison won’t address any of their problems with the railroad. But if that happens, you can bet the government will close the book as the official verdict on Lac-Mégantic and railroad management will be standing there with them.

When you hold public commemorations this year, we ask you to make this point your way. Blaming Harding and Labrie for the Lac-Mégantic tragedy weakens all of us and all our causes. So all of us have to speak up.

Donate now to help ensure a vigorous 

and fair legal defense

Justice for Lac-Mégantic requires Dropping the Charges Against Harding & Labrie

see page 2 for more from Lac Megantic

NPR: A Hard Look At The Risks Of Transporting Oil On Rail Tanker Cars

NPR: A Hard Look At The Risks Of Transporting Oil On Rail Tanker Cars

Marcus Stern has spent the past year investigating the practice. Recent accidents in Canada and U.S. show that the cars aren't built for carrying so much oil, he says, and tracks are deteriorating.

Feb 25, 2015  Copyright © 2015 NPR.    For personal, noncommercial use only. Audio at site


DAVE DAVIES, HOST:  This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who’s off this week. Earlier this month, a train carrying crude oil derailed in West Virginia, sending 27 cars off the track, spilling oil across the landscape and into a nearby creek, and causing explosions and fires that burned for days. And it isn’t the only such accident in recent years.

(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION)

UNIDENTIFIED OPERATOR: Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Oh, it just blew up. A train blew up. You need fire and ambulance – everything – right away.

DAVIES: That’s a 911 call from a derailment and explosion near Casselton, N.D., in December of 2013. Five months before that, a tank car derailment in Canada sparked fires that killed 47 people.

Our guest, investigative reporter Marcus Stern, has spent the past year looking into the risks of transporting oil on rail tanker cars, a practice which has expanded dramatically in the past eight years. His stories focus in particular on how regulators have responded, or failed to, following the tragedy in Canada. Marcus Stern won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his investigation of San Diego Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham. His reporting on the risks of rail transportation of crude oil was a joint effort of the environmental website InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel.  [Editor: See BOOM: North America’s Explosive Oil-by-Rail Problem]

Well, Marcus Stern, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let’s begin with this horrific accident that happened in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic – or at least that’s how it’s pronounced in this country. I’m sure the French pronunciation’s different. This was July of 2013. Tell us what happened.

MARCUS STERN: There was a train that was hauling crude oil – about 2.6 million gallons – and it had a little bit of a mechanical problem. And so the railroad instructed the lone conductor – the lone crewmember -to leave it overnight with the engines running unattended. And he called a cab and went into town, into Lac-Megantic, to get sleep and spend the night at a hotel. And in the middle of the night, the brakes failed on the locomotives. And there were several locomotives. And it started down a long incline. And by the time it reached Lac-Megantic, seven miles down the hill, it was doing 60 miles an hour. It hit a curve there. It derailed and several of the railcars exploded. Fireballs went shooting several-hundred feet into the air. And a tide of flaming oil flowed in every direction, including the direction of a nearby bar/restaurant that was full of patrons. It was one o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night – a beautiful July night. And it immediately engulfed the bar/restaurant in flames. And 47 people were killed. The remains of five people – no remains were found of five of the people.

DAVIES: Because the heat was so intense?

STERN: Yes, it just vaporized these people.

DAVIES: Now, this accident was in Canada. But we’re seeing a lot more rail traffic of tanker cars in the United States. And I guess this oil actually had come from the United States. Why are we seeing so much more tanker traffic and crude oil being carried on railroads?

STERN: What happened is in 2005, roughly, there were advance – new developments in fracking technology that allowed the producers to pull light crude oil from about two miles beneath the ground in North Dakota. And suddenly that was available to them. And they could start pulling it out. They were pulling out hundreds of thousands of gallons of barrels a day. The problem is that, you know, while they suddenly became – you know, had this huge resource, and they now were Texas. They were Texas without pipelines. They had all the oil production of Texas – not quite as much, but they’re now number two to Texas – but they didn’t have any of the infrastructure in place. And so the – very cleverly, they turned to the rails because the rails were sitting sort of idle and not used very much except for by grain farmers. And also, you had refineries on the East Coast that were actually getting ready to shut down because they couldn’t compete with the Gulf Coast refineries that were using domestic crude oil because the East Coast refineries were using oil purchased on the world market at a higher price. So by pulling it out of the ground, putting it on the rails, and sending it to the East Coast refineries, it created a renaissance – an industrial renaissance, if you will – worth tens of billions of dollars, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars. So it was a huge, big, good business story until the trains started to blow up.

DAVIES: So the fast solution to a lack of pipelines to get the crude to refineries was to put it on tanker cars. Give us a sense of how dramatically the rise is in, you know, crude oil being shipped by tanker car.