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My
story tells how one of Canada's most serious derailments happened,
and the havoc it would have caused if it had occurred a few minutes
earlier. No one was killed because a mile-long CP Rail freight carrying
tankers of propane and anhydrous ammonia went off the rails in a
remote rural area; just minutes before, it had passed through large
towns like Belleville, Trenton and Brighton. A second part of the
story examined how drastically railways have cut back on their work
forces and their spending on infrastructure, making such accidents
much more likely to happen.
It began as a very different story. I was assigned to look into
the economics of shipping material by rail and by truck, including
the wear and tear on highways and the disruption caused by the increase
in the numbers of trains running through a town like Brighton every
day. It was a heavy topic, but I wanted to tackle something meaty
during my three-month sabbatical as a reporter for the Independent.
I was on leave from my journalism teaching job at Ryerson University,
and I wanted to have current experience in the field prior to teaching
a new reporting course.
But two events that occurred during early stages of my research
gave the story a much more newsy focus: (a) A mile-long CP Rail
freight derailed and burned near Belleville, causing the evacuation
of 400 rural residents; and (b) Kyle Rightmyer, a CP foreman who
lived in Brighton, agreed to speak out on the record about what
he saw as unsafe maintenance practices.
The derailment was a one-day story on the front pages of the Toronto
dailies. It was a spectacular derailment, but there was no loss
of life. The most striking thing about the coverage was an aerial
photo that showed the burning wreckage...and something else that
went unnoticed at the time but that intrigued me: Far from the burning
wreckage, in the middle of a farm field, lay what looked like the
wreckage of one of the propane tanker cars. How, I wondered, did
a 20-ton tanker end up in a field more than a kilometre from the
wreck? Neither The Star nor the Globe and Mail explained that detail
in the photo, and that's what piqued my curiosity. As I found out
more, the anatomy of the crash, and the decline in spending on railway
maintenance, became the focus of my series.
At first, no one wanted to talk. The 400 evacuated residents of
Tyindinaga Township launched a class action lawsuit against the
railway, and no one at CP Rail wanted to comment. The derailment
was being investigated by the Canadian Railway Safety Commission,
and its probes usually took a year and a half before results were
published. Also, I was working for a tiny newspaper, and all my
attempts to talk with senior people at the railways, Transport Canada
and the minister, David Collenette, were rebuffed. The Brighton
Independent wasn't on anyone's must-talk-to list. I had no background
knowledge of railroads, and I quickly learned that regulation of
their business involves a complex web of government agencies and
legislation; the employees are represented by several unions; and
the railroads have an industry association that compiles lots of
safety data, but it is in business to lobby government and the public.
I spoke to three people who helped clean up the derailment and,
although none would let me use their names, they convinced me that
this was a particularly unusual and serious accident. I pushed on,
with the promise to myself that I would tell this story, but only
using sources who agreed to be named. Surprisingly, the man investigating
the accident for the Canadian Transport Safety Commission returned
my call and, perhaps because I was writing for a small paper, let
down his guard. He told me part of the chronology of the crash,
which I used for my lead, and also the probable cause. The journal
box and axle from the train had been sent to the lab, and he confirmed
that the accident could have happened anywhere. The second important
source was the representative for Emergency Management Ontario,
who told me about BLEVE, the acronym for propane gas explosions.
Mississauga, she said, involved one BLEVE; this one involved three.
A BLEVE causes a rail car to literally rocket into the air, often
as high as a kilometre.
I followed up with the towns the train had just passed through,
and found that they were in the process of rewriting their emergency
plans. Many had never been tested for rail disasters, and so such
an accident in the midst of a built-up area could have been disastrous.
The follow-up story relied on the testimony of Kyle Rightmyer, a
classic whistle-blower who wanted people to know what was rolling
by their windows 70 times a day. He documented the cutbacks in manpower
and the lack of maintenance CP Rail was doing on its busy Montreal-Toronto
mainline. I bolstered his testimony with figures supplied by the
railway industry association, showing that spending on infrastructure
maintenance had declined by 34 per cent over the past three years,
while railway profits had gone up a similar amount.
The reaction the story elicited
CP Rail fired Kyle Righmyer, essentially for talking to me. His
union has appealed and is confident it can win his job back. After
the first story on the derailment was published, no one at Transport
Canada would talk to me (they are very quick to read stories involving
them, and react accordingly. That was one of the disadvantages of
writing a series for a weekly). The other disadvantage was that
the story did not get wide readership. The Independent's circulation
is only 20,000.
Any tips for journalists pursuing similar stories
(a) When dealing with big institutions like government and railroads,
a lot of information is available on official websites. My interviews
were more effective because I had background information and statistics
from the Web. Example: A union official mentioned that something
called the Railway Safety Consultative Committee had not met for
a year and a half, when it was actually supposed to meet every five
months. I got the run-around when I tried to find out why. Then
I found the minutes of the last meeting buried deep down in the
Transport Canada website, and used that to build a sidebar and elicit
a bureaucratic excuse.
(b) Never assume that investigators or people privy to closed meetings
won't talk. The man investigating the derailment talked; so did
the person representing Emergency Management Ontario who sat on
the emergency steering committee. So did the fire chief of Tyindinaga
Township.
(c) Think of unusual sources for missing information. There were
no pictures of the derailment being released. Then I remembered
that Loyalist College is located fairly close to the derailment,
and it has one of Canada's leading photojournalism programs. If
it's that good, it would have had students on the scene. Sure enough,
we got a good shot from a student that carried the first part of
the series.
(d) Think chronology. The strongest element of the first story was
the detailed chronology of the derailment. I really wanted to piece
that together, and it influenced the questions I asked: Where are
the hotbox detectors located? Which car caused the derailment? What
was in it? Where were the tankers of anhydrous ammonia in relation
to the tankers of propane? A chronology, using foreshadowing techniques,
got me into the opening story with maximum impact. The reader simply
had to read on.
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