Ottawa Citizen

The eerie silence within a wasteland

Reporters struggle to contain their emotions on a trip to ground zero, reports

- CHRISTOPHE­R CURTIS.

What you are about to see will make your skin crawl, it will stay with you for a long time.”

Lt. Michel Brunet’s lower lip shook as he tried to prepare a group of reporters for their first and only trip into the ruins of downtown Lac-Mégantic. The longtime spokesman for the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force, says he can’t describe what it’s like to stand inside the broken town.

“It’s emotional, it’s overpoweri­ng,” he said Tuesday. “You really have to just walk through and look and listen. You’ll see what I mean.”

Journalist­s have been reporting about the blast site since an unmanned train derailed and exploded at the centre of town on July 6. They’ve spoken to witnesses and seen aerial footage of the smoulderin­g wreck, but Tuesday was the first time any of them got a first-hand view of Lac-Mégantic’s ground zero. About 30 of us climbed onto a yellow school bus and rode to the other side of the black fence that keeps downtown hidden from the public. The experience was staggering. Shortly after being dropped past a police checkpoint at the southern edge of the steel fence, one local reporter began to weep.

She works for L’Écho de Frontenac, which saw its offices obliterate­d alongside dozens of other buildings.

“It’s not like seeing it on TV — it’s real now,” she said, wiping tears from her face. A police officer held the reporter for a few seconds, consoling her in what must have been an impossibly painful moment.

Nothing is left standing in the heart of Lac-Mégantic. The explosion laid waste to downtown, cutting some buildings in half and smashing others into bits of wood and broken brick.

The tallest structure downtown is now a heap of crumpled oil tankers piled almost 13 metres high. Some still gush oil into the ground as crews work to clean up the contaminat­ed site.

There’s almost a clean line drawn by the destructio­n on Frontenac Street. On one side, there’s the green and white taxi stand, a video store, law offices and the post office — none of which appear damaged. The buildings are idyllic 1950s storefront­s with bay windows and hand-painted lettering. The one strange thing about them is how empty they are and how quiet that main street is.

Across that line is a wasteland: only a handful of blackened trees still stand. Everything else is in mounds of dust and twisted metal. The smell of oil fumes still wafts across the city, though we’re assured the air is now safe to breathe.

Somewhere in the rubble are the 12 bodies that remain unaccounte­d for. Police have sifted through 60 per cent of the area and recovered 38 bodies since July 6. They go from building to building, on their hands and knees, sifting through the ash in hopes of finding more of the dead.

It wasn’t easy to ignore that fact in the deafening silence of downtown — a kind of eeriness broken by nervous laughter or the sound of mechanical diggers collecting scrap beams at a distance.

The worst part of the blast radius is behind a second steel fence. Dozens of men navigated the wreckage Tuesday in hard hats, reflector vests and boots. Two bulldozers slowly carried one of the oil tankers deeper into the Trainyards next to downtown.

“This city was built around the railroad; it’s always been a railroad town,” said Denis Poulin, another local journalist. “During World War II, soldiers headed to Halifax would have a layover in town. It was always a major stop between Montreal and the eastern United States. Now this obviously complicate­s the city’s relationsh­ip with railroads.”

By the waterfront, steel lampposts are melted down from the heat of the fire. The blast also twisted the iron fences that line the shoreline to Mégantic Lake and shattered just about every rock by the boat launch. Oil has gradually been seeping from the clay soil into the lake, leaving a slick, shiny film on the water’s surface. Workers in rubber boots and life-jackets pump the black sludge from the lake and do their best to contain the leak with absorbent pads.

“I don’t know how hot it would have had to have gotten for rocks to burst open, but I can imagine it was awful,” said Sgt. Benoît Richard, one of the provincial police officers who guided the tour.

In recent years, the waterfront had undergone a revitaliza­tion. Until the explosion, it was the site of wedding photos and summer concerts. But Poulin remembers the old days, when he would play pranks on students at the nearby English school.

“They had school on Saturdays; it was right there,” he said, pointing to an abandoned insurance broker’s building. “We would wait for them after school and throw snowballs at them. By suppertime, we were best friends again.”

When we boarded the bus, I couldn’t help rememberin­g what Brunet had told us the previous day. He said that everyone who saw the wreckage up close, without exception, had the same stunned reaction. He spoke about how his daughter could have been one of the people in the MusiCafé bar during the explosion, enjoying an evening out with friends. The thought gave him pause, he said.

Our driver dropped us off near the Ste-Agnès church just before 11 a.m., and it hadn’t hit me yet. When I finally sat down to start going over notes, my hands began to shake. The feeling was every bit as overpoweri­ng as Brunet had described it.

 ?? RYAN REMIORIZ/THE CANADIAN PRESS ?? A firefighte­r walks through debris on Tuesday at the Lac-Mégantic train derailment site. Thirty-eight bodies have been recovered, and the search continues for 12 more. See more photos of the devastatio­n at OTTAWACITI­ZEN.COM
RYAN REMIORIZ/THE CANADIAN PRESS A firefighte­r walks through debris on Tuesday at the Lac-Mégantic train derailment site. Thirty-eight bodies have been recovered, and the search continues for 12 more. See more photos of the devastatio­n at OTTAWACITI­ZEN.COM

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