[URBAN NOTE] "Rail safety group wants to prevent a Lac Megantic disaster in Toronto"

[rfmcdonald]

680 News' Cynthia Mulligan and the radio station's news staff reported on new initiatives to strictly regulate potentially hazardous rail shipments as they wind through Toronto. One of these rail routes literally runs behind my house, paralleling Dupont for kilometres, so I have an obvious incentive for at least some regulation.

They roll through Toronto – long transport trains rumbling in some of the city’s most populated areas like The Junction, Forest Hill and Rosedale – passing close to homes and crossing major intersections like Yonge, Avenue and Bayview.

For the past two years, the group Rail Safety First has been actively raising concerns that a Lac Megantic disaster could happen in Toronto, and on Wednesday night two prominent Toronto MPs are hosting a town hall on the issue in hopes of getting real change to rail safety in the city.

Among the 10 key demands for the federal government, the group is asking for more regulation, rerouting dangerous cargo to less populated areas and forcing trains that dissect the city to slow to a crawl.

“We want to slow the trains down when they are going through densely-populated areas,” says Claire Kilgour Hervey of Rail Safety First. “It’s a no-brainer. It’s easy and it could be done tomorrow.”

Chrystia Freeland, Caroline Bennett and Transportation Minister Marc Garneau will be attending the meeting.

The group is also calling for an immediate moratorium on older DOT-111 cars, the tanker cars that exploded in Lac Megantic.