Bridge failure another blow
Collapse of structure owned by CP has irate Calgary mayor questioning safety priorities
The dark wooden bridge that crosses the Bow river is a great, gaping mystery to the city of Calgary; its origins and safety record unknown, held totally under the provenance of Canadian Pacific.
That was true even at 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, when the deputy fire chief of the floodbesieged city received even more bad news; an eastbound 104-car train derailed, leaving six sleek black rail cars — five of them filled with flammable petroleum product — stranded on the 101-year-old Bonnybrook Bridge as it slowly collapsed into the still-swollen Bow river.
It would drop about 15 feet throughout the day, bringing Calgary closer, inch-by-inch, to another disaster after a week that had been unbearably chock-full of them.
With resources stretched by more than a week of unprecedented flooding that trashed thousands of homes, bridges and roads, the mayor lashed out at Canadian Pacific. He also lamented the municipal government’s lack of control over CP’s domain.
“How is it that we don’t have regulatory authority over this when it’s my guys down there risking their lives to fix it?” Mayor Naheed Nenshi said.
Once again, a swath of the city was shut down, creating gridlock so intense that some drivers complained of commutes stretching three hours. Again, Mr. Nenshi begged em- ployers to keep their employees at home.
Hunter Harrison, the CeO of CP, said the piers of the bridge were built on gravel, not bedrock. The flood caused the bridge to tilt, then crack, derailing the cars as they travelled across the track early Thursday at 14 kilometres per hour.
By Thursday afternoon, acting fire chief Ken uzeloc said the bridge had been stabilized. The fuel tanks were anchored in place by heavy train cars weighted with grain and stones. Secondary tethers tied each tank in place.
There was a small chance the train could explode.
“There are still flammable liquids that are in there,” he said. “We have that possibility … but my concern was more that a floating rail car would float downriver, taking out a bridge that would impact the stability of deerfoot road.’’
With the train secure, city officials reopened major arteries in time for rush hour. But they still faced hours of arduous work.
If crews tried to pull the cars while full, they could snap open like a pill capsule, he said. Instead, empty cars were paired alongside the damaged track and three pumps were installed to transfer the petroleum distillate, a product used as a solvent in polishes, paint thinner and paint.
It would take several hours to complete pumping, Chief uzeloc said; they would then decide how to move the empty cars off the track.
James Carmichael, with the Transportation Safety Bureau, said two investigators were on the scene.
He believed it was too soon to say whether the flood weakened the bridge.
“right now they are trying to stabilize it the best they can to do the work they need to do to get it cleared off,” he said.
The derailment forced a nearby wastewater treatment plant to evacuate, leaving untreated sewage spilling into the urban waterway.
Messrs. Nenshi and Harrison met on Thursday, but it was clear the derailment has strained relations between city hall and one of the city’s largest companies.
“I’ll be very blunt. I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this,” Mr. Nenshi said.
“We’ve seen a lot of people lose their jobs at CP over the last year. How many bridge inspectors did they fire?”
Before the meeting, Mr. Harrison disputed the mayor’s remarks, saying the Bonnybrook Bridge was inspected five times. A CP spokesman later added that in fact the bridge had been inspected 18 times since the flooding began, but because the erosion was on an underwater pier, it was impossible to detect.
“We’ve talked publicly about the downsizing, but we’ve not done anything with the engineering personnel or bridge inspectors or supervisors of the bridge inspectors,” Mr. Harrison told reporters at the emergency Operations Centre in Calgary, where he was to meet the mayor.
“It was clearly a failure of the piers at the bottom of the river,” he said. “We couldn’t have seen anything from an inspection on top unless there was severe movement as a result of the failure down below.’’
The current was too fast and too murky to allow divers to inspect the condition of the bridge, he added.
“We didn’t anticipate a problem like this occurring at all. How long was that going to be? We’re jeopardizing commerce as it speaks.”
Thursday’s derailment is the latest in a string of high-profile accidents at the railway in recent months, as the company embarks on a restructuring.
Six notable derailments have occurred at CP since March. Three of those resulted in tens of thousands of litres of crude oil being spilled.
CP has seen an 8% increase in rail accidents between January and May this year compared with last, or roughly 191 accidents.