Crown outlines case as one of omissions and negligence
Crown outlines case against three accused in Lac-Mégantic disaster
Around 7:30 p.m. on July 6, 2013, Sûreté du Québec crime-scene investigator Steven Montembeault boarded a helicopter from a dock in Lac-Mégantic, hovered above the town’s namesake lake and flew toward its downtown core.
Onboard with a pilot, co-pilot and another police officer, Montembeault was in charge of capturing the area from above with a hand-held camera. He flew over rows of houses, passing fields and forests below. Mountains could be seen in the distance.
As he turned his camera toward downtown Lac-Mégantic, it captured a different view: large plumes of dark smoke extending upward, with northeast winds blowing them sideways.
A large smouldering crater could be seen. The land around it was scorched and blackened. Zooming in, Montembeault could see firefighters still hosing down active flames. A dozen punctured and stained tank cars were piled up nearby.
Visible through the smoke was what looked like a large grid burnt into the soil.
“I believe that was the Dollarama,” Montembeault told jurors watching the 14-minute video at the Sherbrooke courthouse on Monday, giving them a sense of the explosion’s scale and extent of its material damage.
Montembeault, now retired, was testifying during the first day of the trial of the three railway employees charged in the 2013 train derailment. The runaway train barrelled into Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 people and destroying its downtown core.
Flanked by their defence teams, train driver Thomas Harding, 56, traffic controller Richard Labrie, 59, and manager of train operations Jean Demaître, 53, stood one after the other Monday to enter not-guilty pleas to the one charge they face: criminal negligence causing the death of 47 people.
Family members of the victims and people who survived the night in Lac-Mégantic were in attendance, attentive and taking notes.
Quebec Superior Court Justice Gaétan Dumas reminded jurors that the trial is not a “royal commission.” Nor is it the trial of the railway company, Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway. The company will stand trial at a later date.
It is the trial of three men, Dumas said, instructing jurors to consider each accused’s own conduct.
Prosecutor Véronique Beauchamp then outlined the Crown’s case against the three men — if it weren’t for their negligent actions and omissions, she said, the 47 victims would not have died.
For Demaître, the supervisor on duty that night, the Crown intends to prove he was informed of mechanical issues on the lead locomotive on July 5, 2013, but failed to do anything about it.
Later that night, the train, carrying tanks filled with crude oil, was parked 10 kilometres uphill from Lac-Mégantic in neighbouring Nantes when a fire started in one of the locomotives.
Informed of the situation, Beauchamp said, Demaître decided to send a single track-maintenance employee to look into it.
After learning the fire was extinguished, Demaître never verified if someone had gone to check if the train had been properly secured for the rest of the night, she added.
“On the contrary,” Beauchamp said, Demaître told a colleague he was looking for a place in his home where he didn’t have reception on his cellphone.
As for Harding, the Crown said the jury will be presented with regulations and expertise showing he applied a “clearly insufficient” number of handbrakes on the train before leaving it in Nantes for the night and taking a taxi to a LacMégantic hotel.
“A simple test as called for by the applicable rules would have allowed him to notice the insufficiency and correct it,” Beauchamp said.
Labrie, for his part, never asked Harding if he had applied enough handbrakes, the Crown said, even though he was the rail traffic conductor on duty that night and spoke to him before the derailment.
“Unfortunately, this question came too late,” Beauchamp told jurors. Roughly an hour after Harding reached his hotel, the train started rolling downhill toward Lac-Mégantic.
The trial is expected to last three months. Besides the 36 Crown witnesses — a mix of police officers, civilians and one railway expert — the jury will also hear extensive recordings of the railway company’s internal communication system from the night of the derailment.
Those recordings will include a conversation between Labrie and Harding following the derailment.
“You should note Richard Labrie’s silence,” Beauchamp said, “when Thomas Harding indicates that he applied seven brakes on five locomotives, one remote-control car, and 73 train cars weighing 10,287 tonnes and left at the top of a slope.”