With the blame game in high gear over the disaster at Lac-Mégantic, it seems everyone is sympathetic but the person to blame is the train engineer. The best way to explain this kind of blame is the inverted pyramid method. Everyone climbs into the wide open top of the inverted pyramid and points at the person below. The person at the bottom of this inverted pyramid must then be the one blamed.
First out of the gate was Transport Minister Denis Lebel who had his department send out a news release saying his department will investigate. Since nobody had done anything about the study done in 2011 that showed a serious lack of safety on Canada’s rail system, Gerard McDonald, the department’s assistant deputy minister for safety and security insisted that the department “does not hesitate to take steps to enforce (the) regulations.”
The only problem is that Transport Canada has no regulations that seem to apply to the Lac-Mégantic disaster. It seems that it is alright for a single trainman to shut down a train for the night before going off for some shut-eye. Transport Canada has no rule that says an unlocked train with 73 tanker cars of highly inflammable goods cannot be left running on a main line with nobody responsible. All these experts have jumped into the inverted pyramid and are pointing down.
We are given to understand that the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway asked Transport Canada a year ago to allow the railway to have only one operator on its trains. The brain trust at Transport Canada responded by saying there was no rule against one-person crews nor does it seem to have any problem with leaving an unattended train running on a main line. This seems to mean that Transport Canada is responsible for nothing.
The real genius in all of this must be MM&A Railway Chairman Edward Burkhardt. In the classic style of the stuffed shirt company chairman of the 1930s, Burkhardt blamed the engineer. After all, here was the smoking gun: the one person who was responsible for everything that he did—even if he did it on the instructions of the company.
Like everyone else shedding crocodile tears over the dead and missing in Lac-Mégantic, Transport Canada, its Minister, the Railway, the oil industry are all eager to make sure that the engineer is severely punished for being at the bottom of the pyramid.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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