On July 6, 2013, a runaway train carrying 72 tank cars loaded with volatile Bakken shale oil derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, a small town in southeastern Québec. It killed 47 people, orphaned 26 children, spilled a record six million litres of oil and incinerated the town centre.
It was the worst rail disaster in more than a century — a catastrophe described by the editor of the local weekly newspaper as “a chain of explosions and the sound of whistling gas escaping from everywhere: the vomiting bowels of hell.”
