Front Burner - A controversial police probe into fatal BC train derailment

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

It’s been a year since a runaway train derailed near Field, B.C., killing the three crew members on board: Dylan Paradis, Andy Dockrell and Daniel Waldenberger-Bulmer. But questions remain about what led to the crash of Canadian Pacific Railway Train 301. The only formal police investigation into the derailment was done by CP Rail’s own police force. CBC investigative reporter Dave Seglins has dug into the crash for his Fifth Estate documentary Runaway Train. Today on Front Burner, he talks about what he found, and what it can tell us about safety and accountability on railways across the country.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. As the train rolls slowly along the tracks, a camera captures the view. Snapped trees and the snow-covered wreckage of 99 derailed grain cars along the mountainside, many of them smashed up, one ripped right in half. The video is made in the days immediately following the Canadian Pacific Freight derailment near Field, B.C.

Three CP rail workers were killed. Dylan Paradis, Andrew Dockrell, and Daniel Waldenberger-Balmer. It's only just surfaced now, after a CBC Fifth Estate report on the crash and the investigation that followed. One that's left the families of the dead with more questions than answers. I know Dylan and his crew didn't do anything wrong. I'm Jamie Poisson and today I'm talking to my colleague Dave Seglands about safety and accountability on the railways that cross the country through mountains and cities alike. This is Frontburner. Hi, Dave. Thank you so much for being here. Hi there. So I remember this derailment. It was incredibly tragic. And can you take us back to that bitterly cold night in BC

a year ago and describe what happened for me? So there was a train coming from Calgary heading west destined for Vancouver. And this train was coming out of Alberta, up over the Continental Divide and down toward Field, BC. This is a huge mountain. It's where the spiral tunnels have been carved in. It's one of the steepest grades in railroading in the world, but certainly in North America. And it was minus 28 that night, the wind chills into the minus 30s and the train 301 was having problems with its air brakes. Now we've spoken to tons of sources, heard from railroaders who were there that night, hearing things over the radios and pieced this account together. This train was starting to come down the mountain.

The two crew on board were having trouble slowing it. And so their last resort is to throw it into emergency, which is they put on all of the air pressure remaining in the cylinders. It screeches to a halt. It's at the top of the mountain. It's at that point that there is a very fateful decision. They have to secure the train. And the rules, we obtained a copy of the rules. If there are abnormal conditions, such as weather or a poor braking train, put on handbrakes.

That didn't happen. No one put on the handbrakes. But also, that crew had spent so much time getting from Calgary to that point that they were at the end of their maximum allowable hours in the shift. I got a call from dispatch to go to field to pick up a crew. They were upset that they had to work in the super cold weather, and they got called for this train. And by the time they swap out, there's a fresh crew on board that train that has no handbrakes, been sitting there for now two hours, 45 minutes. And according to the Transportation Safety Board, that's when it starts to roll on its own, nothing that that new crew did. And as we now know, it rolled uncontrolled

down through the spiral tunnel. I remember as it flew by and you could hear the brakes trying to be applied like a loud screeching sound he was trying to apply the brakes on this train is constantly accelerating so i was like over the radio the crews all along the track or down in the field bunkhouse are listening to the radio calls of the engineer they can hear them they can hear them the engineer. They can hear them. They can hear them. The engineer, Andy Dockrell, calls out the protocol. He says, emergency, emergency, emergency. The train is out of control. They begin and he starts calling out the speeds. People recall him saying, we're at 20 miles an hour. We're at 30 miles an hour. Andy had his last communication. He said 56 or 57. Wow. And that's much faster than the train is supposed to be going. It's 92 kilometers an hour heading down a stretch of track with a very sharp turn that you're only supposed to be going about 23, 24 kilometers per hour. Very unnerving because you

knew that he was like trying to slow it down, but it wasn't being effective. As the train is flying by, I'm thinking like, good God almighty, like this train could derail and kill these people that I just drove up here. And we now know that that locomotive flew off at the bend, wound up, crashed in the river. And it was 112 cars that were on that train, but 99 of them pile up and derail. It was completely, complete radio silence. And the RTC saying, engineer Andy, do you copy? That was very eerie because you knew that something was wrong.

This sounds like a horrifying experience. What happened to the three crew members? horrifying experience. What happened to the three crew members? Well, they were killed. Two of them, we believe, instantly. One of them, there was a trainee on board, Daniel Waldenberger Balmer. We know that he was thrown into the river. When some of the track workers who happened to be working that night raced to the scene, there was a woman who raced to find him in the river, actually stood in the freezing cold river with the minus 28 temperatures around and found that he was still breathing briefly. But we understand he passed away a short time later. Awful.

This crash, you know, obviously afterwards there are questions. And I understand there was an investigation into this crash. But I was surprised to learn that it was conducted by CP Rail and that they have their own official police force. So tell me more about this. So the crash happens and everybody races to the scene. The crash site is unsettling. Train cars so mangled it's difficult to tell where one stops and the other begins. These cars hauling grain west left the tracks on a bridge plummeting 60 meters to the frigid river valley below. So we've got local RCMP in gold and they raced to the scene. This happened in a national park, Yoho National Park.

CP police, CP, their officials all descend. The Transportation Safety Board is notified, Transport Canada, the coroner, all sorts of people with different jobs and jurisdictions arrived there. This accident happened technically on CP property. The railways, CP and CN in this country, have their own police forces, a long history dating back to the earliest days in the late 1800s. And because this crash happened on CP rail property, Transportation Safety Board will do a safety investigation.

rail property. Transportation Safety Board will do a safety investigation, but the criminal investigation falls initially to the police force of local jurisdiction. That is CP Rail Police. Before we move on, why does CP, this private company, have their own police officers? I understand they can also carry guns. So they are like any other police officer. They are sworn in by a judge. Their job is to police the railways for sure, but they have the duty to uphold all the laws of Canada. So it is a very strange, unique, historical anomaly that you've got a police force that is supposed to be upholding all the laws, but they are actually paid for by a private corporation. So it is strange. They arrive, let's go back to the crash scene. They arrive and they commence an investigation. Through our reporting,

we discover that there is a frontline officer, one of the three main people who was called to investigate, who has since quit the force. I was embarrassed to be part of this investigation. Well, you've got a police agency that's essentially running shop how they want without anybody making sure that there's any police due diligence. Who says, look, I started to look at this. I was told to look narrowly at only the actions of the crew. And when I was asking questions about,ly at only the actions of the crew. And when I was asking questions about, can I get safety records for the train? Can I listen to the audio recordings

on what really happened that night and what kind of instructions were given by managers to the crew on how to keep that train? Essentially, it could include a dying declaration by the three members as they were coming down that hill. He tells us that he was denied access to those. I can't answer as to as they were coming down that hill. He tells us that he was denied access to those. I can't answer as to what they were doing but in my opinion I would say it was some type of cover-up or an attempt to not provide information and if I was in the shoes of the families I'd be asking a lot more questions as to what took place. Now, CP police, the chief, has told us, look, this guy's a disgruntled employee.

He quit. He was the subject of an internal misconduct investigation. We found some infractions. The officer, Mark Deterran, who's gone to work at the RCMP, says, look, that's not true. I left because I had a job to go to, and they're just trying to assassinate my character. So we have this former CP police officer who investigated the case, and he thinks there was some kind of cover-up. What were you able to unearth? I know you've been looking at this. So we started to look at this and started reaching out to railroaders who were there that

night, eyewitnesses. We found people who were in the bunkhouse that night, and we found a whole series of contributing factors, failures at CP Rail. Let me give you a list. There was the failure to put on the handbrakes as per the policy. The air brakes failed. They did not hold that train and that train ran away and derailed. Immediately after the crash, there were 13 rail cars that remained upright. Transportation Safety Board came and tested the air brakes. All 13 cars failed. Wow.

safety board came and tested the air brakes. All 13 cars failed. Wow. We also learned that other trains were having problems with their air brakes in the extreme cold. This is a known problem. CP has manuals for winter railroading that say, look, air leakage in these brake systems is a

real concern, so we have to take special precautions when it gets below minus 25. Hauntingly, the day before this crash the engineer who was killed aboard train 301 andy dockrell was on a previous trip down the very same hill on a grain train and he was having trouble with his brakes he was having trouble slowing the train down and so he radios ahead and says look line the track through i don't know if i'm going to be able to stop when we hit field at the bottom of the hill. Comes down.

He's able to stop eventually, but he writes up a safety hazard report of which we've learned there have been dozens of similar safety hazard reports, flagging issues with brake problems, the field hill, the grain cars in particular. These grain trains are, the cars are old. Andy Dockerell didn't get a chance to file that safety hazard report. It was found in the wreckage the next day among the belongings strewn across the mountain when he was killed. That is an incredibly haunting detail. The night prior to the accident, we were laying in our bed and he was trying to sleep because he knew he was getting called out that night. And I was playing on my phone and he just all of a sudden turned to me and he's like, I don't know if I should go to work tonight. Maybe I'll call in. And I said, oh,

and he goes, yeah, when it's this cold out, the air brakes don't work very well on the locomotives. It's terrible to think. And it's terrible to think that there were other precursor kind of reports that flag some of these issues. We also found other evidence of what CP knew. For instance, a study of how they inspect the rail cars from 2018, we found evidence that they knew that the current system of manual visual inspections isn't catching all the problems and that all sorts of brakes with only minimal or zero braking capacity are being allowed to continue on the rails. And further than that, after that crash in early February of last year, the grain cars got a special safety blitz. And we know through Transport Canada data that thousands of cars were taken out of service for maintenance.

A huge spike in the maintenance of the government-owned grain cars after this crash, suggesting that there was a lot of work to be done. It's a measure of what the state of repair of things really was at the time of the crash. But it took the accident to get the safety repairs done. And the death of three CPU rail workers. Before we move on to how the company is responding to all of this, I imagine it's been incredibly devastating for all of the people working in this industry. It's been devastating, especially for the people who were there that night, the people who are friends and clearly the families of Andy Dockrell, the engineer, Dylan Paradis, the conductor, and Daniel Waldenberger-Balmer, the trainee. It's constant what my son's last emotions, the fear, the terror he must have. He would have been worried about the girls at home. That's constantly in my mind. That's what's on my mind too, coming out that leper tunnel and that straightaway.

Well, you know it would have happened fast. But they had a few minutes to think about what was going to happen. Total fear. I was going to say the fear they must have been feeling. Of the people who were listening to the radio that night, they say they were profoundly affected that listening to those final haunting moments, knowing what was likely coming, um, was horrific. You know, the guys who were in that bunkhouse, I mean, what, what kind of toll has this taken on

them? It's devastation, mental devastation. Tell you another detail. Um, Andy Dockrell was heard saying, look, clear out of the bunkhouse, clear out of the bunkhouse because he thought he was going to reach, there's a possibility he was going to get all the way down to field. And what was sitting on the main line down in the town of field was a train with tankers of

explosive goods. Had that runaway train actually made it around the curve and down all the way, there could well have been a collision, an exploding train in the valley that would have put the entire town at jeopardy. Okay. And I think probably for a lot of people listening right now, their minds are probably going to lack magantique. And that's precisely what was going through the minds with great terror of those workers who were in that bunkhouse who found themselves listening over the radio and running out into the minus 28 cold and dark that night for fear that that's what was about to occur.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. How is CP responding to all of this? So CP has been, we've been in communication over the last couple of months, and they've said a number of really important things. Mr. Creel, my name is Mark Kelly.

I work for CBC television. How are you, sir? I'm doing great. Are you concerned the mistakes were made in this incident? Again, I can't comment to the facts until I look at the facts, and I'll look at them objectively. And if we have some, then we're certainly going to take action with them. We are going to wait for the Transportation Safety Board and their safety recommendations. And they don't want to wade in and say anything at this point about what happened until that safety investigation is done.

We've committed and we respect the process. I can tell you, at the end of the day, cutting corners is not something that we're going to embrace. As far as some conspiracy theory or the truth not coming out, there's no truth in that concern. That's for certain. And we have to respect that. They do not want to pollute the findings. But the key issue that they will not address is the issue around their own police and the criminal investigation. Because right now, there is no criminal investigation.

The RCMP are considering whether they'll look into this. But because CP police only looked into the narrowly actions of the crew, which they say was a thorough investigation, resulted in no charges, no one is examining the role of the company. We asked CP, look, what do you say to the suggestion that you, the company, are potentially negligent? Right. They won't address it.

Okay. They say, look, it's up to other authorities to look at that. If the RCMP wants to come in, step in. Or research or investigate anything that they haven't looked at prior to now, they're certainly welcome to do that. And we'll work in partnership to make sure we make the facts available to them as we know them. So we're looking at what is essentially a gaping hole in the oversight and the investigation process because

the Transportation Safety Board doesn't look at criminal negligence. It doesn't lay charges. It has no expertise to investigate this in the context of criminal negligence. Right, this is a role for the RCMP. I know you spoke to the families of all three men who were killed, and the mother of the trains conductor, Dylan Paradis, had this to say. I know Dylan and his crew didn't do anything wrong. I hold CPR responsible. Their bottom line to keep the trains rolling, no matter what, kill my son and his crewmates. I want to hold them responsible. What did she mean by that, this bottom line of keeping the trains rolling?

The railroaders are under pressure. The faster they can get the cargo to market to their point of destination, the more efficient, the more money that's made by the railway. CP Rail is also under pressure from the federal government when it comes to transporting prairie grain. A couple of years ago, snowstorms slowed up the system to the point that grain was not getting to market, and the government stepped in and started levying fines against the railways for not moving fast enough. And so the railroaders we talked to, they're always under pressure. They're always under pressure. Keep the trains moving. Don't do things that would slow it down. Well, think of

that train that is sitting there on the mountain line. That is CP's main line, east to west from Calgary to Vancouver. If that train has to stop, if that train has to stop for the time it takes to walk the whole length of the train to crank on handbrakes, even though that shouldn't be a consideration, the CEO would tell you, look, we don't cut corners. Safety's number one. But the reality is stopping that train and blocking traffic is going to hold up and have a ripple effect right across the system. So it's this struggle. It's this balance between efficiency and getting there on time and not letting the train stop versus combating and mitigating the risks. You know, we talked about LACMG Antique before.

I wonder what looking into this case tells you about rail safety more generally in Canada. Well, it raises a lot of questions. We've spoken to a lot of railroaders. And one of the things that I find really striking is that there is a culture of fear among the workers and always following and obeying the managers at the expense, many would say, of safety. So that's one thing that concerns me, that that still exists even after Lac-Megantic, even after the tragic consequences of 47 people dying in that Quebec town. Here we have another instance where it was three workers who died. But here's another observation.

Somebody contacted us to point out that back in 2015, when the new Trudeau government got sworn in, the mandate letter from the prime Minister to the new Liberal Minister of Transport, Mark Garneau, said rail safety and cultivating rail safety was a priority for the federal government. The government of Canada is investing $55 million to launch a new railway safety improvement program. Flash forward now to just last December, the next Trudeau government gets sworn in. Same minister, Mark Garneau, Minister of Transport. The mandate letter that was issued makes no mention of railway safety. So it raises a big question as to where this lands

as a priority for the federal government. Okay. Dave Saglin, thank you so much. Thank you. You can catch Dave's documentary on this story on the Fifth Estate's website. And before we go today, a couple of coronavirus updates. The plane chartered to evacuate Canadian citizens from Wuhan, the epicentre of the virus in China, has been delayed because of weather. It was expected to leave on Thursday, but will now be delayed by at least another day. laid by at least another day. The Foreign Affairs Minister, François-Philippe Champagne, is advising any Canadians in other parts of China to get out by commercial means if they can. Also, as of Wednesday evening, two Canadians were among 20 people who had contracted the virus aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship that is currently in Japan and under quarantine. More than 20 people have now tested positive and been taken off the ship.

Roughly 3,700 people are still on board, including 250 Canadians. An announcement on the vessel asked passengers to remain in their cabins. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thank you so much for listening to FrontBurner and talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.