In the night, train brings grief to town in Quebec
They are my friends’ children, they’re former workmates, they’re elderly people that I know. I knew them all. It’s as if I lost brothers, sisters, uncles — the bonds are a bit like that.”
Gilles Fluet
LAC-MEGANTIC, Quebec — It was probably the most festive spot in town as a Friday night turned into a Saturday morning at the Musi-Cafe — a full house, live music, plenty of beer and nachos.
Among the dozens enjoying themselves in the pub was a sizable contingent of the Lafontaine clan, celebrating the 40th birthday of a daughter of prominent local businessman Raymond Lafontaine.
Four days later — having lost a son and two daughters-in-law who were among the revelers — Lafontaine stood near a throng of reporters on a street near the town center, watching them pepper an American railroad executive with questions.
“I wanted to see my children’s killer,” Lafontaine said. “And I wanted to see the killer of other people from here who didn’t ask to die.”
Any culpability on the part of the railway remains to be determined; police say their criminal investigation will proceed slowly and carefully. But it is fact that an unmanned Montreal, Maine and Atlantic freight train with 72 cars carrying shale oil turned into a runaway death machine — rolling away from its overnight parking spot, barreling for miles down an incline in the dark of night, derailing in the heart of Lac-Megantic at 1:14 a.m. on July 6, and snuffing out 50 lives when a series of explosions set off a ferocious fire.
For some, it became known as “the train of death.” For others in the closeknit, French-speaking town, it was “le train d’enfer” — or “the train from hell.”
Gilles Fluet, a 65-year-old retiree who used to work at a door-making factory, left the Musi-Cafe just moments before the first explosion and saw the train go by.
“It was moving at a hellish speed ... no lights, no signals, nothing at all,” he said. “There was no warning. It was a black blob that came out of nowhere.”
“I realized they were oil tankers and they were going to blow up, so I yelled that to my friends and I got out of there,” he said. “If we had stayed where we were, we would have been roasted.”
Those who were still in the pub, he said, “had no chance.”
Among those spared by quirks of fate was the cafe’s manager, Sophie L’Heureux. She told reporters she went home around 9:30 p.m. that Friday evening, planned to return after a nap but overslept. Three of her employees are among those presumed dead, along with many of her loyal customers.
Nathalie Royer and David Isabel could have been among those doomed regulars, had it not been for home repairs they planned for later Saturday morning. The couple, both 45, left the cafe shortly after 1 a.m., with Isabel telling Royer to forgo one more drink with their friends because they had to get up early.
They decided to leave their car parked outside the bar and started to make their way home on foot. They ran when they spotted the train; Royer lost a shoe, stumbled, and suffered a burn on her arm, according to her mother, Louisette Nadeau.
“The people that died there — it’s a lot, because we’re a little town,” Nadeau said. “There’s almost none of them that we don’t know.”
The explosions and fire destroyed 30 buildings in all, including the public library that housed irreplaceable historical archives.
And the ordeals aren’t over for the town. Only a few of the bodies recovered from the rubble had been formally identified as of this weekend. Relatives of the victims were asked to supply combs, toothbrushes and other personal items that might help experts at a Montreal laboratory make DNA matches.
“The work is long and arduous,” said Genevieve Guilbault of the local coroner’s office.
On Saturday, a week after the crash, the bells of Ste-Agnes, the Roman Catholic church on the very edge of the disaster zone, tolled 50 times at midday in honor of the dead, followed by a minute of silence observed by a solemn crowd filling the church steps.
Like others in town, Gilles Fluet, a retiree who left the Musi-Cafe just before the crash, was bracing for a series of funerals.
“They are my friends’ children, they’re former workmates, they’re elderly people that I know. I knew them all,” he said. “It’s as if I lost brothers, sisters, uncles — the bonds are a bit like that.”