HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
Widow of CP Railway engineer, above, killed at work Dec. 2 is struggling with questions concerning his death
The widow of a CP Rail engineer killed on the job on Dec. 2 is still struggling with questions about the death of her husband, a safety-conscious, long-serving company veteran.
“My first question was ‘how did this happen?’” Brenda McLean said. “My husband had been working there 32 years and is like the safest guy there.”
Kirk Charles McLean, 56 and the father of two grown sons, was killed at CP Rail’s Port Coquitlam yard.
“This should not have happened,” she said. “My biggest concern is I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
McLean’s death was the 10th railway fatality in the last 24 months in Canada, according to the Teamsters Canada
Rail Conference.
Brenda McLean was told that her husband had just left the train he brought in to the CP yard and was walking across tracks on his way to book off from his shift when he was struck by the moving cars of another train.
In a brief exchange with the coroner the morning after the incident, she said she learned that the scene was very dark and initial pictures showed Kirk had his hood up and appeared to be looking down.
For her, that raises questions about why there wasn’t better lighting, whether there had been radio communication to alert others that Kirk had just brought a train into the yard, and management’s role when two trains or more are moving in the yard.
She put some of her concerns in a letter that was sent to investigators, a copy of which was forwarded to Postmedia by a family spokesman.
“Not I, my boys or hundreds of people who worked with Kirk will ever believe that nothing was ‘wrong’ that night,” she wrote in the letter.
The Transportation Safety Board is still “gathering information to determine what level of investigation we would do,” said TSB spokesman Christopher Krepski.
Union spokesman Christopher Monette said the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, which represents 3,500 CP workers, share the family’s frustration.
Such investigations “really do take time,” Monette said, and while the union has participated in parts of the investigation, “we’re still far from having a complete picture of what happened.”
In the meantime, the family is planning a celebration of life for Kirk McLean, set for Thursday at the Best Western Plus Mission City Lodge.
Brenda McLean said the doorbell of their Mission home rang after midnight last Monday, and at first she thought their younger son might have forgotten his keys.
“I got up and, coming down the stairs, you can see out, and all I could see was a sea of black,” she said, referring to the CP Rail police officers, RCMP and representatives from victim services outside.
“All I remember hearing is the word fatal, and I lost it,” she said. “And then I had to tell the boys. My mom lives with us and she was quite distraught.”