Tapes show sliver of Lac-Megantic terror
that night fielded hundreds of calls related to the train derailment.
“For the first call, our (dispatcher) was skeptical because I guess it’s hard to imagine an entire town burning like that,” Veilleux told Postmedia News. “Then she saw the switchboard light up and knew something was terribly wrong.”
In less than three minutes, the call centre’s night manager woke up its director of operations, who then called the region’s civil security director to warn the department of the escalating crisis.
Just a few minutes later another six dispatchers showed up to work the phones. Soon, a call from the Lac-Megantic fire chief came in and confirmed what many had feared: the city was burning and there weren’t nearly enough firefighters to contain it.
“To give you an idea of how crazy it was, the fire chief ’s radio melted so, for a moment, we were kind of MONTREAL — The 911 dispatcher sternly pries as much information as she can out of a frantic caller.
“Sir, what is your emergency?” she asks.
“Yes, there’s a fire in downtown Lac-Megantic,” he says, as someone screams in the background.
“Okay sir, in Lac-Megantic? What address?” “Yes, it’s on Laval Street.” “What’s burning.” “It’s an enormous fire.” “What is burning?” the dispatcher yells, betraying her growing impatience with the caller. “All of downtown.” That was the first in a series of 911 calls recorded the night of the fatal train explosion in Lac-Megantic, Que., in July. The tapes, obtained by Radio-Canada, offer a glimpse into the panic that gripped the town as flames consumed the downtown core, killing 47 people.
Most of the calls sound oddly subdued, with people calmly and politely trying to explain the extent of the disaster that woke them from their beds in the middle of the night.
The first few callers describe an explosion by the train tracks on Millet Street near downtown. But soon reports of the spreading blaze begin surfacing across the town, with dispatchers struggling to understand the scale of the emergency.
“You’re saying that all of downtown is burning?” one dispatcher asks.
“Yes. This isn’t a joke,” an elderly man says abruptly.
Daniel Veillieux is the director of the St-Georges-deBeauce call centre that co-ordinated rescue efforts on the night of that fateful blast. He says the 16 operators on duty in the dark,” Veilleux said. “But we managed to secure a backup radio frequency and kept in touch with him. Eventually we were getting calls from fire departments in the United States offering to chip in.”
The operators who weren’t scrambling to keep up with the buzzing phone lines were tracking down as many ambulances as neighbouring communities could spare.
“We were scouring Beauce and Estrie and telling them to start sending whatever paramedics they could,” Veilleux said. “We thought with a fire this size, we’re going to see lots of injuries. But, ultimately, the ambulances were kind of unnecessary. The people who died that night were killed almost instantly.”
An early problem the call centre ran into was that while the fire raged in LacMegantic, the dispatchers still had to handle emergencies from the 559 other rural municipalities they serve.
While 30-metre flames continued lighting the sky over Lac-Megantic, a factory in Farnham, Que., also caught fire.
“Life didn’t stop for us that night. We have to treat every other emergency just as seriously,” Veilleux said. “We get 350,000 calls a year and there wasn’t just LacMegantic.”
Within about 20 minutes, the calls began to die down as it became clear that first responders were on the scene. Still, despite the extensive training they receive, a lot of what the operators heard that night will stay with them forever.
“We don’t generally know how an emergency call turns out,” Veilleux said. “The ambulance will get on the radio and say, ‘ They don’t need us anymore’ and not, ‘Someone is dead. They don’t need us anymore,’ so often we just don’t know how things end up. But we knew what happened in Lac-Megantic and our workers are also human beings who have to deal with the things they hear.”