Recovering. Reinventing. Rebuilding. Raging. Grieving.
Peggy Curran’s report opens a weeklong
Gazette series
“For my son who is a firefighter, it was the first time he had seen a body.
“None of the firefighters wanted to go into the MusiCafé because they knew everyone there. I told Pierre, ‘You have to go in,’ and he went in with the pathologist. He was 36, so he knew people. They were his generation.
“That’s why at night I would go see them and make them talk, ‘Tell me about your day.’ And I would tell their wives to make them talk, because it is necessary to cope with the stress.”
In the weeks and months since the deadly derailment and fire, front-line responders especially have been encouraged to seek counselling, even if they don’t think they need it.
“These are events that they have never experienced,” Charland said.
“They talk about the collateral damage ... Even today, there are still many people — and in the coming months there will be many more — who need to be watched.” “Sometimes, I am going down rue Laval and it hits me again, ‘Oh yes, there was a tragedy,’ ” said Suzanne Poulin, co-publisher of L’Écho de Frontenac. “Sometimes I forget and then, ‘Oh, there it is.’
“Under the snow, it was almost beautiful. It covered everything up. When the snow melted, we saw it again.”
Grief and anger descend in waves, triggered by a chance encounter, an unexpected drift in the conversation or a glimpse of the charred heap of ashes where the main street used to be.
“There are many, many kinds of mourning,” Poulin said. “There are the people who are dead, and the daily reminders — the loss of the grocery store and use of the park. There are all those small things. Seen from the outside, people might say, ‘C’mon, pull yourselves together.’ ”
The independent weekly has served as information hub, sounding board and unofficial conscience for Lac-Mégantic since the early hours of July 6, 2013, when the MMA train careened down the steep track from the village of Nantes into the valley beside the lake. There, moving at ferocious speed, the tanker cars would jump the track, plowing into buildings and igniting explosions and a fire that was visible from space.
“People here have a real desire to think about other things,” said Rémi Tremblay, L’Écho’s editor. “They desperately want to have a normal summer. But that’s not going to happen … The centre of town remains a giant work site. This is not a normal summer.”
It doesn’t help, Tremblay said, that there has been a steady stream of strangers in town — recovery and construction crews, journalists, people who want to see the damage for themselves.
“In general, people are very welcoming, even if at times we think there are too many people coming, too many visitors,” he said.
“For 11 months, we have been isolated,” said Gérard Poirier, who lives with his wife, Diane, in a seniors’ residence on the other side Chaudière River. Two of their nephews, Stéphane Bolduc and Jean-Pierre Roy, were among the victims at the MusiCafé. Diane Poirier said the men’s parents are among the walking wounded. Although the Poiriers lived in an area outside the fire zone, their home was evacuated for a few weeks when emergency crews feared oil had leaked into the sewers. A year later, construction and roadblocks throughout the downtown core mean running even the simplest errand is complicated.
“To cross the river into town, you have to make a big detour. We’re using up a lot of gas and the Red Cross won’t help us with that,” Gérard Poirier said. There are no simple answers — and much uncertainty and civic tension — about how Lac-Mégantic can be reborn without being transformed it into something entirely different.
A casino, a tourism and convention centre, a memorial plaza or theme park are just a few of the suggestions that have been floating around. Opinion is split on what you do with a railway town if and when it stops being a railway town.
“In the days after the tragedy, there were many opportunities for the reconstruction. It allowed all kinds of ideas to flourish and for the imagination to run wild on a clean page — to create something grand and unique in the world,” said newspaper editor Tremblay. “But reality keeps pulling us back — there is a question of costs. There is also a question of political will.”
No matter how much people respect and place their faith in “la mairesse Colette,” Roy-Laroche has been quick to admit that town council’s powers are limited and call for backup.
The change in the provincial government from the Parti Québécois to the Liberals in April has also left people in the region guessing, particularly given the new government’s emphasis on belt-tightening.
“We have not yet heard what is the willingness of the new government toward Lac-Mégantic,” said Tremblay. “We find ourselves with a government intent on restraining its expenses, rather than opening up and imagin- ing something truly special.”
In late May, the Liberal Member of the National Assembly for Mégantic riding, Ghislain Bolduc, was named to chair a cabinet committee overseeing the reconstruction. Municipal Affairs Minister Pierre Moreau said by the end of March, Quebec had spent $124 million toward on recovery, decontamination and the construction of a new bridge over the Chaudière River.
Even if Lac-Mégantic could talk Quebec into footing the staggering bill to pull up the tracks and reroute rail traffic away from downtown — early estimates puts the cost of a bypass at anywhere from $50 million to $175 million — such a move would need the approval of the federal government, which has jurisdiction over rail traffic, and support from the Central Maine and Quebec Railway, a U.S. company that in May purchased the assets of the bankrupt Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway.
During his first meeting with residents last month, a public forum which L’Écho reporter Claudia Collard described as a “charm offensive,” CMQ president John Giles said the company wants to start shipping oil, bound for New Brunswick, through Lac-Mégantic once safety concerns have been addressed and derelict tracks have been upgraded.
But the very notion that oil tankers could ever roll through the middle of Lac- Mégantic again infuriates many residents. “In the old days in Mégantic, there were trains, but they carried corn, wood, animals. Nothing dangerous,” said Jean-Denis Turcotte, 82, who owns a flea market uptown on Laviolette St.
“Forty or 50 years ago, there was talk of redirecting the trains, but the plan went nowhere.
“Now, they are rebuilding. We’ll have the old centre of town on one side and the new one on the other and the train will pass between the two. Imagine if this ever happened again? It would destroy both sides.”
Turcotte lives several blocks away from the tracks in a fanciful turreted house he built, inspired by a place he saw during a long-ago holiday at the Côte d’Azur.
“When the blasts of the explosions sounded, I was afraid it would fall on my house.”
Turcotte’s daughter Céline owned one of the first buildings engulfed by the fire — a 19th-century brick structure she and her husband had renovated as an antique and gift emporium. There was an apartment upstairs. Jimmy Sirois lived there with his wife, Marie-Semie Alliance, and their 18-month-old child.
“His mother dropped by that Friday and said, ‘It’s too hot, I am going to take the baby home with me.’ The couple died. The baby was orphaned,” Turcotte said, his voice shaking.
“My daughter is depressed. She is unable to forget. They had worked so hard to get that building fixed up. It was beautiful, and she is unable to bear what happened. She has moved away. That makes me sad.”
Turcotte can’t help thinking that if only the town had made a clear decision to rebuild the houses that burned down and move the train tracks, his daughter wouldn’t now be living in St-Élie, near Sherbrooke. She’d still be a few blocks away, inviting him over for dinner every Saturday night.
“Why does the train have to go through our town? Make a detour. That is what people want. If there was a vote to keep the train tracks where they are or move them, the vote would be 90 to 95 per cent for moving them.
“We don’t want the trains to pass here.”
Charland is an amateur historian whose exhibit on the history of the railway in LacMégantic opened in the old train station two days before the derailment. He doesn’t think shunning the trains is a good idea.
Megantic was “born with the train and it dies with the train,” said Charland, who also sits on the “Réinventer la ville” committee that drafted the proposals for reconstruction made public in June.
“If we stopped the trains from coming tomorrow, we might as well shut down the town. Absolutely.” Charland cites Tafisa, the particleboard manufacturer that is the town’s major employer, as just one of the business that would suffer — and possibly go elsewhere — without easy access to rail transportation.
To be profitable these days, he argues, railways need oil. “That’s where we are at. If they can’t transport oil, companies won’t come here. If there are no trains, there will be unemployment. There will be huge job losses.
“You lose one job and you lose two more indirectly.”
Not surprisingly, defending the railway is not a popular position in the wake of last year’s tragedy. “It is very emotional,” Charland said.
“People want the tracks to be redirected. But it will be very, very costly to do that.
“You are talking $100 million at least, just for starters to redirect the train, and we would need another bridge to cross the Chaudière, and a branch line to bring the oil on toward Maine.
“Governments need to get involved much more than they have. The mayor has limited powers. The federal government, which is responsible for the railway, needs to do something. But that is difficult ... We all know the oil comes from the west, and Mr. Harper is from the west.” Tremblay agrees. “I think the case of LacMégantic creates a problem for the federal government because the oil industry is their natural ally. They can’t be seen to be slapping their hands in public.
“To put their fist on the table and say, ‘You are responsible, you have to pay,’ that would be political suicide for them. They have too much to lose by trying to force them to heed new transportation regulations.”
Yet Tremblay sees rerout- ing the tracks away from the centre of town as a big deal, and crucial to Lac-Mégantic’s well-being — something people preoccupied with the daily frustrations of road closures and when the new Métro grocery store will open may not realize.
“There is a tendency to think that it is too much. But I think that if this had happened in another part of Canada or in the United States ... well, they are crankier than we are.
“I think even if it had happened in New Brunswick, Ontario, Alberta or B.C., it would have been handled differently. By the federal government, and by the communities themselves,” said Tremblay, who fears Quebecers in general are not prone to stand up to industry, even in their own best interests.
“We see it in the split in the population here. People who say, ‘The train has to come back, even if they have to come with tankers that pass through the middle of town, so be it, because the economy depends on it.’ And those who say, ‘We have lost enough already, make them go elsewhere.’
“It has kind of a perverse effect, to oblige citizens to tear themselves apart, while outside governments and industry don’t offer any solutions to assure their safety.” Along the stretch of Veterans’ Blvd. bordering the bike path, between the youth sports field and the waterfront park where there will be no concerts in the gazebo or evening strolls this summer, a couple could be seen planting young oaks, in remembrance of the people who died and hope for rebirth. Another row of trees went up not far from the high school where so many displaced residents were housed in the days and weeks after the accident.
Closure is a long time coming in Lac-Mégantic, with plans for a much larger memorial park in the zone where so many people lost their lives still in the very early stages — and partly contingent on what happens with the train tracks.
“Where the Musi-Café was could be a memorial, including an agora by the lake where there could be shows,” Charland said. “Because that area is a kind of graveyard. Who is going to want to build there? No one.”
Meanwhile, people who own property within the Red Zone are growing nervous, troubled by letters from the town suggesting it might want to expropriate their land for development whether they want out or not.
For now, comfort and progress move with baby steps, such as the library or the promise that a new bridge across the river will open by September, or the successful people-powered campaign to allow cyclists and pedestrians to use the existing one.
“Even the smallest new access point is like magic,” said Poulin, recalling those first weeks after the derailment when most of the downtown core was off-limits. “The town was a real labyrinth. Everywhere you went, you came upon a barricade or a wall. So to regain a small space — even 100 or 200 metres — was like, ‘Wow!’ ”
Tremblay believes much more could be done to lighten spirits if the town let people use the waterfront park, which lost some trees but was otherwise unharmed.
Until now, town officials and cleanup crews have refused access to the Red Zone until decontamination work is completed, either for safety reasons or to prevent vandalism of vacant houses.
“Not to be able to go to to the park in the summer is huge. I also see it as part of the effort of reclaiming the centre of town,” Tremblay said. “We miss our little corner of
greenery.” There was a strange kind of silence outside Lac-Mégantic’s temporary courthouse on a warm afternoon in May as three employees of the nowdefunctMMA—Thomas Harding, Jean Demaître and Richard Labrie — arrived to be arraigned on 47 charges of criminal negligence arising from their actions or failure to act on the night of the deadly derailment. Charges were also filed against MMA itself — just two days before final transfer of the bankrupt company’s assets to Central Maine Quebec. Yet relatives and friends of the victims took little satisfaction that justice would be served by prosecuting three low-level employees while MMA’s abrasive founder, Ed Burkhardt, walks free.
“Charges, yes, but for the right people,” said Danielle Lachance, mother of Karine Champagne, who died at the Musi-Café. “He was the owner of MMA and he came here and he had this air like everything was normal, like he wasn’t affected that we had lost all the people we had lost.”
“What is justice?” asked Richard Boulet, 67, who was forced out of his apartment for five weeks last summer. “Forty-seven people are dead. I don’t know.”
In June, proceedings began in Sherbrooke on behalf of more than 3,500 people seeking the right to file a class-action for hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution from MMA, Burkhardt, and the oil companies and railroads with which they did business.
Because, as Musi-Café owner Gagné put it, “there has to be someone responsible when you kill people and demolish a town.”
“It would have been easier if it had been an asteroid or earthquake,” Tremblay said, some force of nature for which no human could be blamed.
People in California who live in earthquake zones know the risks they face, he said, and the difference between Mother Nature and human failures.
“If what happened in LacMégantic had happened in California, they would see it as a corporate crime. Here, we don’t have the guts to call it a corporate crime. We aren’t like that. But that’s what it is. It’s not a term we use, even in the class-action suit,” said Tremblay. “The true culprits are the company and the laxity of the federal government, which ignored the mounting dangers.”
He said governments and individuals have to look at what happened in Lac-Mégantic not as “a mathematical calculation” — what will it cost to fix it — but as a matter of conscience for everyone.
“I think the whole world is watching us.
“If we fail in the reconstruction, it sends the message that there is nothing to be done if a tragedy like this happens elsewhere. Because it will happen. People elsewhere will know that no matter what the costs or the sacrifices, that it won’t change the way the oil industry operates,” Tremblay said.
“If we fail in this, it will be even more dramatic than the loss of life. It will be the loss of the environment. It is a global message that industry and economics are more important for governments than the safety of their citizens.”