Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB) says it’s looking into a railway derailment that sent two people to hospital just after 10 p.m. Friday, after two trains collided east of Revelstoke, B.C., sparking a fire.
A statement from train operator Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) says one of its trains hit another one, which was stopped nearly 13 kilometres east of the southern Interior city, roughly 150 kilometres northeast of Kelowna.
“The TSB is currently gathering information and monitoring the situation,” spokesperson Liam MacDonald told CBC News in an email Saturday, “but we have not deployed investigators to the site.”
CPKC says that four train cars, carrying grain, on the stopped train were derailed.
The railway says there was also a fire on one of the trains that has since been extinguished, and their crews remained on the site Saturday to investigate the cause of the crash and clean up the damage.
“Two crew members on the moving train were taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. One has been released,” the statement reads. “There were no other injuries.”
Revelstoke’s fire chief said they responded to reports of a train crash and someone being trapped inside the train just after 10:30 p.m. PT Friday.
“I had a conversation with the CPKC representative who told me there was in fact a fuel fire caused by the locomotive that was off the tracks,” Steven DeRousie, head of Revelstoke Fire Rescue Services, told CBC News in a phone interview. “As far as I understand, the fire is now out.”
DeRousie said that, while fire crews initially responded to the reports of someone being trapped on board the train, they were then told by ambulance crews that the person was out of the train and returned to the fire station.
The fire chief said they could not respond to the fire itself as the derailment happened outside city boundaries.
He added that an “acrid smell” hung over the town of around 7,500 people after the fire on the train, but there were no immediate concerns for the city’s water supply.
“It smelled somewhat like maybe burning garbage — that plastic-y odour,” he said Saturday afternoon. “It was an unpleasant odour. It seems to have dissipated now with the the fire being put out.”
CBC News has asked the operator if there was any damage to the surrounding environment, including nearby streams. They have yet to respond as of publication time.
Source Agencies
