The effects of a train derailment in northern Ontario linger on 10 years later
CBC
On March 7, 2015, Mike Benson was the first person to drive up to a giant plume of smoke from a pile of smouldering oil tankers.
A CN train had just crashed outside the small northern Ontario town of Gogama. Benson was the volunteer fire chief at that time.
"It was two kilometres away and the sky was all lit up," he said about the sight when he first looked up.
"There was obviously something pretty serious going on. When I got there, the oil was running down the ice."
The crash was actually the second to occur in that part of northern Ontario in a few weeks. On Feb. 14 there was a smaller derailment in a remote area, about 45 kilometres from Gogama.
In the first days of the response, Benson said collaboration between the small volunteer fire service, CN and Ontario's ministries of the environment and natural resources was "fantastic."
"We all seemed to be on the same page," he said.
Because the crash happened in the winter, emergency crews could let the fire burn for a couple of days without fear it would spread.
Once the flames had died down, they were about to extinguish the remaining fires and start work on remediation.
Although he was told the bitumen in the tankers would float on freshwater, making cleanup easier, Benson said he later learned some had sunk in the Makami River, next to the crash site.
It's estimated that around 2.6 million litres of crude oil spilled into the environment, including wetlands and the river that flows into Minisinakwa Lake.
The Ontario Court of Justice has ordered Canadian National (CN) Railway to pay an $8-million fine after the company pleaded guilty to causing two derailments near Gogama in 2015 that spilled a total of over three million litres of crude oil.
"Everybody I spoke to told me that it was clean. It's perfectly safe. We're well within standards," Benson said.
"But I knew that two weekends previous to that a friend of mine had dropped his anchor and pure oil came to the surface."
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