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NEWS REPORT 1 (EAST PALESTINE):  Breaking news, a train derailment and major fire tonight about an hour from Pittsburgh in East Palestine, Ohio.

NEWS REPORT 2 (EAST PALESTINE):  When we seen the smoke, I mean the whole entire sky was just orange. The whole entire train’s on fire. All you can see from one end to the other end is nothing but fire.

NEWS REPORT 3 (EAST PALESTINE):  Soon as I opened the back door, all you could see were flames. It looked like our town was on fire. I looked at my house, and I honestly thought that was going to be the last time that I would ever see it again because I just thought the town was on fire still. And I said, if my house catches on fire, please call me. Please let me know what happens.

NEWS REPORT 4 (LAC-MÉGANTIC):  After a parked train came loose, picked up speed, roared off the tracks, and exploded in the middle of the night, burnt rail tankers are still steaming in the heart of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec.

NEWS REPORT 5 (LAC-MÉGANTIC):  The destruction downtown stretches several blocks. Dozens of homes and businesses reduced to rubble. Nothing but debris where once stood an apartment building, a bar, and the town library.

My life has changed, she says. It’s changed forever. I wasn’t ready to have her taken away. I still need my mom, but she won’t be there anymore.

NEWS REPORT 4 (LAC-MÉGANTIC):  Officials in Lac-Mégantic gave another sad update today. 38 people are now confirmed dead. 12 have been identified.

NEWS REPORT 5 (LAC-MÉGANTIC):  So, as one local put it, the railway helped to build Lac-Mégantic, and now it’s destroyed it.

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ:  Welcome, everyone, to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the host of this podcast and I’m also the editor-in-chief and co-executive director of The Real News Network.

DR. NICOLE FABRICANT:  And I’m Dr. Nicole Fabricant. I teach anthropology at Towson University. I’ve been working for 15 years in an overburdened area of Baltimore, a community named Curtis Bay, where 70-plus toxic polluting industries are housed in one residential area. This zip code has some of the highest rates of respiratory illness in the entire country. 

I became interested in questions of rail when a CSX, a Class I rail line carrying coal to Curtis Bay, an export pier, their silo exploded in 2021, leading residents to ask why a coal pier was located a thousand feet from a recreational facility, and why wasn’t a billion-dollar rail company protecting the community from fugitive coal dust?

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ:  Nikki and I are going to be co-hosting this special episode today, and you’ll understand why it’s so special in a minute. As you guys know, for the past three years on this show, along with covering other essential working class stories and labor issues, we’ve been speaking regularly with working people in Ohio and Pennsylvania whose lives have been forever changed by the Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in early February of 2023. 

We won an Izzy Award for our coverage of this horrific catastrophe at The Real News. And on this very show, you’ve heard directly from sick residents, sick union members and nonunion members and retired union members and their families about the hell that they’ve been going through ever since. And you’ve heard from American railroad workers about how the deregulation and Wall Street takeover of the rail system made this wholly avoidable national tragedy a nightmarish inevitability.

DR. NICOLE FABRICANT:  But before East Palestine there was Lac-Mégantic, one of the deadliest rail disasters in North American history. On July 6, 2013, an unattended 74-car freight train carrying crude oil rolled downhill and derailed in the town center of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. The train, operated by Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, had been parked overnight on a slope in a nearby town. The lone engineer had shut down the locomotive and gone to a hotel for the night. 

A fire broke out on the lead locomotive while the train was parked. Firefighters responded, and in the process of fighting the fire shut down the engine, inadvertently disabling the air brakes that had been keeping the train stationary. 

After they left, the train began to roll, gathering speed over 11 kilometers of downhill track before derailing at a curve in Lac-Mégantic’s downtown core around 1:15 AM. 63 of the 74 tanker cars derailed, and highly volatile Bakken crude oil they were carrying ignited immediately.

The resulting explosions and fire were enormous, destroying 40 buildings in the town center, including a popular bar that was full of patrons at the time. 47 people were killed. About 2,000 residents had to be evacuated, and a large portion of Lac-Mégantic’s downtown was obliterated. It remains a stark example of how these cascading institutional failures, regulatory, corporate, and operational, can lead to catastrophic consequences.

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ:  As journalists and researchers, Nikki and I have spent years embedded in different working-class communities with people who are living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones. 

Now, sacrifice zones are basically areas where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself. Neighborhoods poisoned by industrial pollution, communities dying from decades of economic disinvestment and social decay. Towns abandoned to face the deadly effects of manmade climate change. From East Palestine, Ohio, to South Baltimore, from coal and fracking towns in West Virginia and Pennsylvania to rural communities impacted by industrial agriculture and the explosion of new data center construction projects, we have done everything in our capacities as journalists and researchers to document, report on, and lift up the voices, stories, struggles, and needs of sacrifice zone residents.

And yet, along with the residents themselves, we have come to the sobering conclusion that media coverage and academic study of these injustices is just not enough to stop the destruction and to hold corporations and the government accountable for their crimes and to get affected residents the help and justice they desperately need and deserve.

DR. NICOLE FABRICANT:  We’ve got to use whatever tools and abilities we have to bring people together on and offline. That’s why Max and I are working together and bringing our networks together here on The Real News Network. And that’s exactly what we’re hoping to do with this podcast. 

With the help from the incredible folks at Railroad Workers United, we’ve brought together a truly historic panel of residents who survived the Lac-Mégantic disaster in Canada and the East Palestine rail disaster here in the United States. Please introduce yourselves.

ROBERT BELLEFLEUR:  My name is Robert Bellefleur. I am the spokesperson for the coalition of citizens and organizations committed to supporting the Lac-Mégantic railway, which was created in 2015 following the Lac-Mégantic tragedy.

GILBERT CARETTE:  Hi, my name is Gilbert Carette, Lac-Mégantic resident and member of the Lac Megantic citizens’ coalition for railroad safety. We started this coalition, and we’ve been working hard for the safety in this town, rail safety in this town. And we want the rail out of Lac-Mégantic. We want the control lane. So, that’s our fight now for… we’ve been fighting for years.

So, I introduce you to my older brother from the railroad safety coalition, Gilles Fluet beside me, that he was the first witness of the tragedy. He came out from the music cafe bar that was [sitting] about 50 feet from the crossing. Gilles went out from the bar at 1:00 in the morning, about that. And just at the time he crossed it, the railroad crossing, by about three feet or four feet, the ghost train just passed behind me, almost killing him.

So, I’ll let him introduce himself in French.

GILLES FLUET:  My name is Gilles Fluet, and I was an eyewitness to the arrival of the ghost train in Lac-Mégantic, where I saw the train rushing past me. I realized it couldn’t make the upcoming curve and that everything was going to explode. I shouted to the couples in front of me, let’s run, it’s going to blow up. And while I was helping the woman up, three times she fell into the street as she was running away, that gave me a chance to see the train start to derail and everything that followed right up until it got very close to us on Frontenac Street where the music cafe was and where most of the people died.

Normally, I’m from Mégantic, so I’ve known about trains since I was a kid. We could predict when a train was coming because we could hear the whistles, train whistles as they sounded when the train approached other crossings before, before the ones where we were, but this time it was a ghost train. There was no crew on board. There [were] no shouts, and it was traveling at 105 kilometers per hour. The warning signals at the railroad crossing didn’t have time to signal the train’s presence. There was no horn, no engine, no brakes, no cars clattering together as normally they would when a train breaks. It was unpredictable.

GILBERT CARETTE:  It was just going down 65 miles an hour. No train could do this curve downtown that more than 15 miles or 20 miles an hour. The curve was just too crooked, so it was impossible for that train to keep on the rails.

ANNE-MARIE SAINT-CERNY:  My name is Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny. I’m not from Lac-Mégantic. I’ve been an activist against contamination in what you call sacrifice zones, cancer clusters and stuff like that, for more than 30 years. I was in Lac-Mégantic five days after the tragedies because I understood the intense contamination that would happen there. And there, I decided to go to the bottom of that to name the people, not the system, but the people responsible for what happened. 

And to this day, I am sad to say I think what I did in the essay and the two books that I published on that, I think that is the more in-depth investigation of what happened there that exists since the authorities did a cover-up, they didn’t do any investigations.

JAMI WALLACE:  My name is Jami Wallace, and I’m from East Palestine, Ohio. I lived within the one-mile zone when the Norfolk Southern train derailed in my community. I subsequently found out that my house was contaminated, and if we had blindly listened to the EPA and went back into our house that great harm or death could have came to my family. Ever since then, I’ve been fighting. I’ve been fighting for justice, for accountability, and to make our railways safer for everyone across America.

CHRISTINA SICELOFF:  My name is Christina Siceloff and I am from Darlington, Pennsylvania, and live about six miles from where the train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. After the derailment, there was a following vent and burn that occurred, and most of the plume from that had gone over my home and the surrounding areas around East Palestine, and [I’ve] have been dealing with health issues in my family ever since, and also met Jami through this.

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ:  Well, first of all, thank you all so much for being here with us, for sharing your stories with us. This is truly an important and historic conversation to be having with y’all.

I want to go back around the table, starting with our guests from Lac-Mégantic. I want to ask if you could remind listeners now and in the future what happened in your towns and to your towns? How did you experience these disasters as they were unfolding?

GILLES FLUET:  Continuing from the explosion in the city and train derailment. I’d never been through anything like that before. It was the result of that kind of stress. I was in a state of shock. It took quite a while, I’d say five or six months, before I more or less returned to my normal state. I was in shock. I didn’t realize what I’d just been through. I felt like I was in a bad dream, but I was aware of everything I’d seen, of everything that had happened. But I kept telling myself, there was this little voice inside me saying, this can’t be happening. But it was reality, unfortunately so.

After the derailment and once the intense media pressure started to die down a bit, I realized that all sorts of people were coming to Mégantic. First, there were crowds of onlookers who came to see what was happening. People who didn’t understand anything and found it all unbelievable. After that, there were people who were approached by Anne-Marie about environmental issues and all sorts of other things, including safety concerns. There were a bunch of opportunists who came looking for good business opportunities. We’ve seen that and we’re still seeing it. 

I also realized later that it was frowned upon to name the real culprits, if you can call them that, or the potential culprits. The real potential culprits. I noticed a certain amount of censorship regarding the way reality is portrayed. I also realized that while we were closely following the trial, the defendants in Sherbrooke, that we seemed to be disrupting the proceedings. I don’t know why, but you didn’t seem to be welcome. We were even almost kicked out. That has left me with serious questions ever since, and I continue to learn more about it every day.

I also realized today that the vast majority of the people in Lac-Mégantic and the surrounding area are hardly in a position to hear the true story from someone who lived through it because it still hurts too much. Because I’ve given guided tours to some people I know who wanted to understand, and most of them at some point would say, stop. That’s enough. I can’t take it anymore. So there’s a collective wound that’s still there, one that most people try to downplay, sweep under the rug or forget, but it’s part of their lived experience, part of their history. Whether they like it or not, they have to accept it sooner or later.

What I take away from all this is that half an hour, an hour before the disaster struck, there was a little inner voice, call it my intuition or whatever you want to call it, there was something telling me I had to leave the music cafe and get out of there. And I dragged my feet a bit, but I left just in time because if I’d left five minutes later, I would’ve died at the music cafe. So, when your intuition, when that little voice speaks to you, listen to it. Otherwise, it’ll cut your life short.

ROBERT BELLEFLEUR:  I wasn’t in Lac-Mégantic on the night of the disaster. I was out of town and heard the news around 6:00 AM the next morning. My partner called me and said, Robert, downtown Lac-Mégantic is on fire. A train just derailed. It’s caused an apocalypse in Lac Megantic. My parents were evacuated. They’re at the Lac-Mégantic High School and I’m fine, honey, I’m fine. 

But anxiety started to set in. So I rushed down, I grabbed some supplies and several liters of water, canned goods, bread, knowing that all the food services would be closed. So that’s it. And when I got within 30 kilometers of the town of Lac-Mégantic, I saw the plumes of smoke, and I have to admit it was surreal. It was the apocalypse. It was as if Lac-Mégantic had just been bombed.

At the time, I was employed by the Quebec Ministry of Health, so I was quickly assigned to help establish safety measures and provide care for the population. We set up a crisis center at that time where we also coordinated all community services, collaboration with the fire department, paramedics, and the authorities in the city of Lac-Mégantic. So, I was very busy putting together an organizational plan to try to salvage the situation because that’s how it was.

I remember going to the high school, which was serving as a shelter safety center, and seeing people completely distraught searching for their loved ones because they were missing. At that point, we had identified more than 300 people missing in Lac-Mégantic, and everyone was searching for one another. The question was, were they among the victims or not? So it really was a catastrophic situation. It was truly human suffering that I was able to witness and feel.

GILBERT CARETTE:  For myself, I was out of town by that night. I was out for a funeral, but by the middle of the night, I received a call that Mégantic was on fire. So me and my wife, we went rapidly back to Mégantic. And the shock to see that much flames and black smoke, hell of a smoke in the heart of your town. It was just like a dart going through your body. It was a terrifying surprise, a shock. And I could repeat what Robert said which was my feeling too, but just like I can explain myself that losing a part of yourself, a part of your own town and projecting the future about what will be our future, rebuilding that. 

And in the next answers, in the next question, we’ll be talking about the other catastrophe that we’ve been through. The fire by itself was the first catastrophe, but what we lost after was a second and a third catastrophe that we’ll be following in the discussion.

ROBERT BELLEFLEUR:  I have a comment to make regarding the establishment of the crisis center. What I observed made me a bit skeptical, namely that federal and provincial authorities took control of the situation. It was outsiders who came to manage the crisis in Lac-Mégantic. Not even the city council was involved in the decision making. The fact is that all decisions were made from outside Lac-Mégantic to manage the disaster and reorganize the town center. We were stripped of our powers as citizens and as a community to the benefit of the governments who did everything they could to stall the situation, hide the real causes, and exclude us from the important decisions that needed to be made. 

We were even manipulated because they brought us in for that purpose, to keep us as a population from rising up in the face of the tragedy we had just suffered at the hands of a railroad company. They organized music shows for us for two weeks to calm us down, to stall us, to prevent us from clashing and reacting. They lulled us into complacency as a community. It practically euthanized our desire to take control of the situation.

ANNE-MARIE SAINT-CERNY:  I got there five days after the tragedy simply because on day one what was put on the media was obviously lies, which we could very easily find out by ourselves. The first lie was that there was no contamination, only a hundred thousand liters, which was each car had that and there were a bunch of them. So that was a lie. 

Second, most important also, I think, is the fact that it was a very heavy oil which would not explode. Well, there had been two huge explosions during the night, and just by following the tracks you could see that it was Bakken oil, so it was very volatile oil. So, within a few hours the lies were out. So that’s why we decided to go there.

For me, when I got there, I thought that Mégantic was the symbol of everything I’ve seen, which was predators, governments who oiled the doors [that] held them, and then the victims left to themselves. And this was the symbol of everything, but one extraordinary distinction was the fact that there was death and nobody could deny them. No authorities could deny them. Contrary, for instance, to asbestos or the coal mining diseases where they say, oh, the people smoke too much. Well, this time they couldn’t deny the death. There were deaths. 

So, I thought it was an easy way to demonstrate what was the whole point of these tragedies, capitalist tragedies when they override the same thing that we see everywhere in the world. If I want to be more rational than my friends, I spent 10 years with them. They’re my friends, all the people in Mégantic. 

And if I want to sum up for [the] lesson’s purpose, there is the initial shock, which they describe very well. But do not think that when those things happen, it stops there. It lingers on for years and years to come.

So, the first step is the initial shock. Then very quickly there comes the shock doctrine, Milton Friedman’s shock doctrine, which I will say it’s more well said by Zuckerberg now, go fast and break things. 

So, within a few days, all those people go there and say, we’re going to demolish everything and do what we want, all those predators that are there. That’s the second step, go fast and break things. The third step is the people wanted the truth, what happened, the consequences, what were the real consequences, and they were trying to find justice in some ways. 

And there you saw the entire Canadian and Quebec judicial machine, police machine go on three guys. I’d say two guys, the conductor, the engineer, and the controller. The entire Canadian justice machine went on those two guys and decided they were the culprits. And this started the entire coverup of the trial, of the no investigation.

And to this day, even the Supreme Court of Canada has denied the Mégantic people any rights to seek any justice against CP, which was CP at the time. So, this is why people like us are important. And then you’d say, well, at the end of the day, the predators and all those people would go. Well, they don’t because they do after 10 years, 15 years, they do still have even more support from the governments to do their business. So CP is now dictating where, for instance, the new rail will go if it goes. So, those four steps means that for a long, long, long time, the tragedy is not a one chuck time, [it] is a long, long process. So, this is why it is so tragic.

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ:  And Jami, Christina, for our guests in Canada and for folks listening to this, could you just remind them what actually happened to your towns and how you experienced it firsthand?

JAMI WALLACE:  On Feb. 3 of 2023, a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine. There were a bunch of different kinds of chemicals that derailed. The biggest focus has always been on the vinyl chloride.

What was allegedly happening, which we found out later that this was not true, is the local officials and higher level government officials were saying that one of the tankers full of vinyl chloride was going to explode. They were saying temperatures were rising, the valve that was supposed to release pressure wasn’t working, and that this explosion was inevitable. What they said that they needed to do was to explode the tanker themselves to do a vent and burn. Their reasoning was that if the tanker exploded on its own, it would throw shrapnel within a mile radius and destroy downtown and probably take lives. 

We later found out that this was not true at the NTSB hearings. Norfolk Southern, the responsible party, was the one in charge and giving advice. And they were telling our officials this while at the same time the owner of the vinyl chloride, OxyVinyls, was in another room telling Norfolk Southern it’s not going to explode, temperatures are going down. 

But they wanted to get the railroad back up and running. So they did a vent and burn where they caught these tankers of chemicals on fire. It went from one tanker to five tankers of vinyl chloride that they ended up exploding. The pictures are unimaginable. The mushroom cloud looked like an atomic bomb was dropped. When you show that picture to anyone across the United States, that’s the first thing they associate it with.

We were told less than 48 hours that it was safe to go home, that there were no high levels of chemicals and that everything was great. The air quality was great. And it was kind of the same thing that was being said before, is you just knew. I didn’t have to be a scientist. I didn’t have to be smart to look at that plume and know that less than 48 hours that they could tell us with certainty that it was safe to go home. 

So, I threw a fit when they came to do this little, they offered some indoor air testing before you came home, which we’ve since found out was insufficient. The little monitors they were using couldn’t test for all chemicals of concern. Other chemicals, it couldn’t test at low enough levels to be an accurate reading. And when they did that at my house, I asked them, what about the creek that’s running in front of my door that I can see chemicals in? They’re like, we did water tests and we will check those later. I asked them about the soil. Has the soil been tested? And we don’t need to test the soil. There’s no reason to test the soil. 

So when you talk about the cover-up from the beginning we were being lied to. As soon as people went back home, the symptoms started, the nosebleeds, the rashes, the coughing and respiratory issues. You could just see by the reaction of the body that it wasn’t safe to be there. They gaslit us, tried to tell us that it was stress, that it was mental mass psychosis. We weren’t really sick, it’s mass psychosis. But we knew, we knew what our bodies were telling us. 

You talk about the denial by the local government. Our village still doesn’t talk about the people being sick. We have 64 people in our community with cancer now. The same things they were talking about all the nonprofits coming in. We had people coming in to try to do mutual aid donations. We had the media there. We had scientists coming in. And through this disaster, we learned that not all those people can be trusted. 

So, I actually see a lot of the same similarities between the story in Canada and the story here. They immediately started buying the town big gifts to make people forget or to mask it. So, it’s amazing when you hear these other stories and you hear all the same things happening and this is in a different country, but it’s the same playbook.

CHRISTINA SICELOFF:  So, out where I’m at, I live in the middle of the woods, and on Feb. 3 we saw on Facebook that there was a train derailment, and my family went out onto our front porch to see what was going on, if we could see anything. And through the trees you could see the fire and the smoke six miles away. We just stood there, like was said with you all, in shock. It was like we thought everybody in East Palestine was burning to death because the fire was so huge. It sort of reminded me of what you would see with California wildfires. 

And then that weekend we didn’t hear anything about what was going on in town. My son and I, we went to a playground that was still about six miles away and everything looked fine. And then Monday came and that was Feb. 6, whenever they did the vent and burn. Beforehand we heard that there was people that were being evacuated from town, but we were not given any evacuation notice where I was at. We were not told to shelter in place. 

And then I had to take my son to preschool, and the school district had sent out a notification that they were evacuating the schools because they were going to be doing this burn. And so he did not have to go to school yet that morning, so he was still at home. Before they did evacuate, I had debated on taking him to school because they were already shutting down roads going around my area. And so he didn’t have to go to school anyway. But then when they did the burn, we were never evacuated after that. We were never told to shelter in place. We looked to leave on our own, but there wasn’t really anywhere to go, and you didn’t know where to go.

Afterwards, when everybody was being told that everything was fine, the air was fine, the water was fine, we were seeing thousands of fish popping up in the creeks that were dead, frogs that were dead. Several of our… we had chickens and we have outside cats and a dog, and many of them, the chickens and the cats, had died. 

And Feb. 14, I decided that I wanted to see with the creeks what was true with the fish. So, I went to the creeks and saw the sheen that was left from the chemicals that were in the water that traveled down to the Ohio River. And that was the start of me going to the creeks for the next two and a half years to show that the government was saying one thing and we were experiencing another. We even had myself and two other residents, we were oftentimes going to the creek recording on video and putting on YouTube what was going on. We also had our now vice president down there in the creeks with us and he saw what was going on. And now to this day, he still doesn’t really act like anything is wrong anymore.

JAMI WALLACE:  I can just add something because I think Christina underplays her role in this. We had what we called creek rangers, and Christina was one of those creek rangers. She was told by the US EPA that her and the couple of other residents were in the creeks more than the EPA was. At one point, the EPA would call Christina and these other creek rangers and say, hey, we think we have it cleaned up. Can you guys come down and check? The creek rangers were reporting to the EPA where the contamination was in the creeks and to come look at the contamination.

If it wasn’t for residents like Christina being down at those creeks, they wouldn’t even be cleaned up as much as they are now. We were told they were clean until the residents started going down and showing that they weren’t clean. I know that Christina doesn’t like to toot her own horn, but she was a huge, huge part in getting at least what they cleaned up in our community.

CHRISTINA SICELOFF:  I just wanted to add real quick with that was at one point whenever Norfolk Southern came in to set up their cleanup area, they had lost containment of contamination that they were supposed to be blocking from further going down the creek, and another resident was there to film it, and the Ohio EPA was made aware by Norfolk Southern’s contractors that this contamination was going down the creeks and they had not done anything about it. And then the videos went up on YouTube from the resident and the federal EPA found out about it and called up the creek and said, shut it down. And they shut everything down. 

They had spent maybe a month in redoing the plan and then they called us and said, do you both want to come down and see what we are doing with this new plan and we want to know if you approve of it? So they said we could not film, we could not record, but we could come down and see what they were doing. And then whenever they put out the papers on the report on what they had done, they lessened the amount of time that the contamination had been going down the creeks. They said it was between it was like two to three hours maybe, but it was really more like five or six with the resident body cam recording the entire thing.

DR. NICOLE FABRICANT:  OK. So what we’re hearing from our friends in East Palestine is the way the government has failed. EPA failed you guys. There was obvious lies that came out of the EPA not doing the job that they were supposed to do and you’re talking about the ways communities responded. The overburden that many of these communities have to take a lot of this on themselves. So, curious to hear from our friends at Lac-Mégantic about the failures at every level of government and the ways in which community had to respond in the aftermath.

ROBERT BELLEFLEUR:  The thing is, in Lac-Mégantic, we felt that control was coming entirely from outside. They sent us like press spokespeople from the various governments to control the message to calm the public to prevent them from rebelling. So, we tried. We saw a parade of politicians come by to try to console us. However, when we asked them to set up a public inquiry commission, the answer was a categorical no. So, we felt manipulated and divided by the government forces that had taken control of the situation.

We as citizens decided in 2015 to form a citizens coalition for rail safety because the transport of oil and hazardous materials had resumed six months after the tragedy. The railroad was rebuilt just outside downtown Lac-Mégantic for economic reasons. And when I learned about this situation, I went to inspect the railroad tracks surrounding Lac-Mégantic and found that the rails were still in very poor condition even though hazardous materials 10 times more dangerous than the shale oil that had set the town ablaze were now being transported on them. We’re talking about propane gas, sulfuric acid, sodium chloride, and gasoline. 

So, we formed a coalition to monitor rail transport and alert the media whenever we identified a problem on the tracks. And since then, trains have continued to transport hazardous materials. Trains are now twice as long with more than 200 cars and tank cars carrying twice as many hazardous materials, and they still pass through the city center at the same spot on tracks that are often in very poor condition. 

Every year we have to speak out in the media and to the authorities to get safety deficiencies on the railroad tracks corrected. It’s still happening though, and the trains are twice as dangerous, more dangerous because they’re longer and are traveling on a hazardous slope. So if the brakes fail yet again, we’ll end up with a much more dangerous disaster similar to the one in East Palestine because this time toxic substances will be spilled and our entire environment and population will be at risk. The oil itself, it burned right there, but a chlorine explosion, which is amplified by a propane gas explosion, would contaminate the entire atmosphere for tens of kilometers

GILBERT CARETTE:  Following what Robert said, I’ll be talking about the second tragedy, that half of the town was destroyed by the explosion, [and] the other half wasn’t contaminated, but with all the speculators that ran over Lac-Mégantic, they wanted to control, take the control of our downtown. 

So, just they were planning to build a kind of holiday resort, like a Walt Disney. So they declared that on 40 buildings left, they were all contaminated, but only five of these buildings were contaminated. So they decided to clean up all what was standing up, so they finished it to destroy our downtown. After they destroyed what was left up, it was just like a desert. That was our second catastrophe, really heartbreaking. 

And I know that the human things that I want to talk, there were 47 victims, but we can’t forget that many suicides followed these lost lives, many suicides.

ROBERT BELLEFLEUR:  In reality, Lac-Mégantic has experienced three disasters, as Gilles mentioned. First, the train derailed. Following that, the complete demolition of the downtown area against the wishes of the residents. The goal was to increase property values in order to collect more municipal taxes, and this is the fundamental reason why the city council opted for this course of action. And third, they succeeded in dividing the community over the bypass project. They managed to create chaos and conflict to divide the community on an issue where we should have been united. The bypass project was meant to be a project for social healing. They turned it into a project of social division, and there are friends and families in the region who haven’t spoken to each other since then.

ANNE-MARIE SAINT-CERNY:  Well, first I want to start on the base of Nicole’s question, which was where were the authorities and the authorities that were in charge of safeties, environmental and authorities and all that, they were all absent. So, there was no Environment Canada there, nobody. The rail safety people were the inspectors, and the investigators were linked with the company, MMA at the time, which MMA was CP, which is now Norfolk. So, there were no authorities except to gather the data and keep them secret. 

So as an activist for 30 years, but also the case of East Palestine and Mégantic are an example if there are no community surveillance, if there are no communities implicated, there [is] nothing, you are at risk because [of] your authorities. And we saw that for myself, I saw that for the first time in Mégantic, which was the biggest massive death of modern Canada.

You have to remember that they talked about the 47 death, the 26 orphan, the suicides, and the people that died of grief like my friends and our friends, Jean Clusiault, who lost his daughter and died last year. 

And so, there were no authorities to keep the people safe. So the communities, the testing and all that, are essential. The surveillance of what they’re doing, it’s essential. 

One of the reason for that is that I don’t know, I’m not sure about the States, but in Canada there was this, and I think it’s the same in East Palestine, there’s this perfect effect of the contaminator is in charge of the contamination. So what [it means], really, is that all those railroad companies are keeping the data for themselves, and you are not able to access them. To this day, we don’t know the official numbers of the official contamination of Lac-Mégantic. It’s all kept secret. The only thing we know is what we ourselves did. 

One thing also is important is that when there is such destruction as in Mégantic, the community, except for some very resilient people like the three guys you have on right now, is just such in shock that you cannot move anymore. You have to try to survive. And so it is important that the people around that have knowledge and expertise and ONGs and all that get in, not to exploit them, but to help them literally. 

And one of the things that’s lacking is all the safety measures that are usually we think are controlled by the authorities are not anymore. So we have to get the data for that so that they will know exactly what was happening. That’s the only way as of now for the past 15 years that we can… I’m not sure right now that we can stop those things happening, but at least we can react to protect ourselves, and we have to say that we have to rely on ourselves.

JAMI WALLACE:  Listening to this is giving me goosebumps. And exactly what Anne just said, we learned very quickly in East Palestine that no one else was going to fight for us if we didn’t fight for ourselves. Everything that was done in East Palestine as far as dioxin testing, as far as making them dig the tracks back up and clean up the contamination, that was all led by the community. They actually, in the United States, you cannot run trains through an evacuated town. We had a north and a south track. They had our tracks rebuilt within 48 hours of the vent and burn. Trains were running again through our community before residents were back in their homes. Another similarity, Norfolk Southern was put in charge of everything. We did get the testing that they did, but it was all flawed. It was put out in a way that benefited the corporate polluter because they were the ones that hired the contractors.

And an important point that I want to bring up is we talk about the people that we’ve lost, but we’re not talking about all the people that we have yet to lose. When you’re exposed to these types of chemicals, we know from every other chemical disaster it can take years before these things show up in our communities. Cancer is one of the biggest concerns, and cancer is not a quick, beautiful death. If you’ve ever seen someone suffer from cancer, it’s horrific. 

The other thing that I wanted to bring up was about the multiple disasters. We talk about that in East Palestine too. The derailment itself was a disaster. The vent and burn was a disaster. The flooding that occurred in our creeks afterwards that spread those chemicals, another disaster. They were talking about the cleanup. When they were hauling all this dirt out of our community, there were points where you couldn’t see across a residential street because the dust was so bad, it looked more like a dust storm that you would see out West.

And then of course that whole economic recovery, that’s another disaster. You want to talk about a divide in a community, you should see what it’s done to our small community that I always thought was tight-knit. We always looked out for each other, but the focus on the economy has overshadowed any focus whatsoever on human health. Our local government cannot focus on both because who would want to come here and shop if they knew it was contaminated? And what they’ve done is they’ve put lipstick on a pig. They’re putting in a $25 million park and they’re given all this money to distract us from the fact that they poisoned us. 

And again, I know I keep saying this about this playbook, but just listening to these stories when you hear this stuff, I literally was getting goosebumps on my arms listening to the similarities, and that’s where we all need to come together because it’s not just about East Palestine. These disasters are so much bigger than that. You look back through the history of the United States and 40 years ago, Love Canal; Times Beach, Missouri; what’s going on now in Roseland, Louisiana; Moss Landing, California; Conyers, Georgia. They might not be train derailments, but they’re still chemical disasters, and they’re still being treated with the lack of transparency, the coverups by our government, and no one is helping these people. 

And that’s what I’ve been trying to go into other communities and help them organize and help them learn what we had to learn the hard way. And going back to the very beginning, the very first part of that is to teach communities they have to fight for themselves. We want to trust our government. We learned in school what our government does. The EPA is supposed to protect the environment and human health, and a lot of people just depended on that. They trusted their government. But don’t do that. Don’t be led blindly. Go out and do your own research. I am by no means an expert in chemicals, so the first thing I did was surround myself with experts in chemicals. The resources are there, you just have to find them

CHRISTINA SICELOFF:  Like the people in Lac-Mégantic say, with the mental toll afterwards, there is a lot, and that it is another disaster in itself. For a long time, a lot of us here that were recognizing the illnesses, we were putting aside our mental health, and that was because the government and the other authorities were putting so much on this just being health problems because of our mental health. We have lost a person due to mental health since this happened. 

A lot of us are now in therapy and have multiple mental health diagnoses because of what we’ve experienced. And it is something that at first you don’t realize what is really weighing on you and it takes a long time. I think it was the beginning of last year where they had finally diagnosed myself with PTSD, and a lot of people around here have gotten that diagnosis as well now. And just like hearing your stories as well, it brings back a lot of the emotions and the memories of what we were experiencing at the beginning of this, just hearing about the fire, and there’s just so much that’s very similar.

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ:  Well, and the very fact that we are having this conversation right now with residents from Lac-Mégantic and East Palestine is a stark reminder that these disasters are not once-in-a-lifetime tragedies. Disasters like these are happening more frequently all over the place. 

And as working people who have experienced such disasters firsthand, I wanted to ask if you could say what have these whole awful, unforgivable, life-changing experiences taught you that you most want to communicate to others out there who are going through this now or who may go through it one day?

GILBERT CARETTE:  I’d like to say that the only thing that we want to make things changing on this planet is we have to fight again and we have to push our governments to change things, just like all the safety rules that associate people got to be the first from the subject and the first, just like the people are suffering from disasters, people should be the ones through our governments to build safe society. If we stop fighting, just like Anne-Marie said, we have to go through regulation, new regulation and all that, and don’t let profit [go] first, but let’s fight for safety first, not profit. That’s the main word I would like to say.

ROBERT BELLEFLEUR:  I’d like to add that after 13 years, the years we’ve lived through, it’s still appropriate in light of the Lac-Mégantic tragedy and in the face of all this silence from governments and railroad companies aimed at downplaying the impact on communities for us as citizens to continue defending our living environments and to remain vigilant regarding all the shortcomings we may still observe. 

We as a citizens coalition have managed for 13 years to continually alert journalists to unacceptable situations and that has had an impact. I remember we sent a formal notice to Canada’s minister of transport at the time because a railway track was in poor condition. We’d finally managed to obtain a report from an inspector. An official confirmed report identified more than 137 defective rails in the Lac Mégantic region. We sent a formal notice, and a few days later, 150 railworkers arrived to repair everything.

So, as citizens, we can still make a difference when it comes to situations that are unacceptable on the part of our governments. So, I encourage you in East Palestine to keep fighting because we can no longer rely solely on the government and corporations. We have to protect ourselves.

GILLES FLUET:  There might be one small point I can bring up. For those who are going through a major disaster like the people in Mégantic or, say, like East Palestine and others who have been through similar experiences, I advise them based on my own experience to talk about it, not to keep it bottled up inside, and start talking about it right away from the start because if they try to deny the situation, keep it bottled up inside, it’s catastrophic, it’s destructive. They’ll destroy themselves, self-destruct. 

The main reason to talk about it is that it’s like self therapy because no matter what kind of therapy people undergo, whether with a psychologist, psychiatrist, or anyone else, they’ll guide you to talk about the situation that traumatized you, so you have to start talking about it right from the start to let it out so it doesn’t explode.

ANNE-MARIE SAINT-CERNY:  So, these things are going to, as you say, these are industrial tragedies that are going to go on exploding again and again because there [is] nobody to take care of us anymore, the people. 

I would like to talk more as an activist, but also as what we represent here, that is the nonlegacy media, the researchers. So, I would talk also as an author and as an investigator with what I think [the] first thing is I have no more confidence in any of the authorities that are supposed to keep our wellness, health, security, wellbeing, happiness is even further away, though I can see some signs of hope in the States sometimes these days, but still I have no more justice. We cannot have justice. So, it’s going to maybe get worse before it gets better, but it’s going to get better. 

But I will say this to all of us, and especially like podcasters or researchers and people like that, communities are doing their work, but all of us together, we have to never surrender. We have to hold the line, how I would say Michael Fannone, hold the line so that even if one of us fails as a human being because we’re fragile in those [circumstances], somebody else will take the flame and go the further route to go. So, we have to hold the line. 

And we outnumber them, although they have now and things that have changed even since East Palestine, the means, the AI, the media concentration is something that we’ve never seen in the history of humanity. And so it’s going to be hard, but we have to hold the line, and we can because we outnumber them. 

And how do we do that? We expose the facts, we go on with the help of people like you, with all of us together, the real facts. And remember, the facts are hardheaded. You may say anything about the inflation and the price of gas in the states and that there’s no inflation and everything’s going fine, but when you go to the gas station, you see the price of the gas. So, facts will come and will make themselves known, and people will eventually change. We have to stop the gaslighting. 

This is why I did my last book on migrations and the fact that migrants and all those people are the source of all our misery, which is not true when you look at the facts. So, we have to stop the gaslighting, put on the counternarrative based on facts, and we have to go with confidence that facts will prevail and we also have to find their Achilles’ heel, as I say — I think talon d’achille in French, if I’m not right, correct me — Which is the weakness because we see them as huge, and they are, trillionaires the first time, but they all rely on such simple things like water, like data centers, water, electricity, things like that, those things they steal from us to get richer and more powerful and all that. But it’s ours and we can very simply sometimes get back, and we will get back those things that are owned by the entire humanity. 

And I have a lot of confidence that we will prevail in the sense that if we would not, we would be extinct for a long time right now if only the predators and the powerful men, as they say now, would prevail. So, let’s hold the line.

GILBERT CARETTE:  Thanks. I’d like the last word. I mean, thanks for all your people for organizing that great summit, and the last word to say that the door is also open to meet you in Lac-Mégantic, and we’ll be really happy, and we hope to meet you in your towns too. So, we’ll be following to collaborate together, and don’t be shy to communicate with us. The door will also be open. Thanks, Max. Thanks, Nicole, and thanks, Anne, and everybody, and Marie, Jami and Christina, and who else I’m forgetting, but our door is also open. Thanks. Great thanks.

JAMI WALLACE:  You hear people talk about environmentalists and people that want to protect the environment and they’re kind of out there and they’re these extreme activists. But I think what we all fail to realize is that when we kill the environment, we’re killing ourselves. We need those resources to live. Just like anything else, valuable resources are going to be used. They’re going to be tapped out, and we need to start protecting that environment. I don’t think that our world as a whole is ever going to ban chemicals. I think that’s a hard fight. We’ve all become so dependent on the products that these chemicals produce for us, the luxuries that we get from them. 

But what I think is an attainable goal is to make sure that the manufacturing, storage, and transportation of these chemicals are the safest that they can be to protect the humans and the environments that are close to these facilities. And that’s why I started the Chemically Impacted Communities Coalition because I feel like we need to take all these fighters from all these different communities and bring our voices together. We also need to be a resource for other communities that this happened to. I know I wasn’t one of those environmental activists. I had no clue where to even start finding the resources to help myself. So I formed, again, Chemically Impacted Communities Coalition, but it is CICC for short, to bring all those people together in a coalition. 

Nikki knows, she was there too. We spoke last week in Chicago at the [Railroad] Workers United Conference. We need to even bring in the workers, the railway workers. If they’re not safe, we’re not safe, and they know what’s going on firsthand. So, this coalition is a lot bigger than just the communities that it happened to but the workers that it impacted. It’s about bringing together the resources. Here’s a list of places you can go. Here’s trusted media. Even the media we couldn’t trust. Some of the media would want to cut your interviews to make you say what they wanted you to say. 

So, I feel like it’s so important to bring us all together, and I’d like to invite Lac-Mégantic to join that coalition because this is not just a problem in the United States. This is a worldwide problem. One of our member communities is Bhopal, India. So the bigger our voices can be, the louder we can be, the better the chances that we’ll be heard. 

And I just wanted to say real quick, Max, thank you. I’ve said since the beginning that journalists save lives. It’s this awareness. We have to keep speaking, and people, we need the journalists to put out our voices. And this was never so apparent as when our attorney was granted the motion to intervene in the federal court case against Norfolk Southern. The judge frankly said, I’ve heard all these stories on NewsNation, read it in the New York Post, and I’ve seen none of this evidence. You don’t want to show us this evidence. The attorney said no. So our attorney intervened and it was granted, but it was all because of journalists. So, don’t underplay the power that you have in your hands and the power of keeping our stories going and the awareness you create.

CHRISTINA SICELOFF:  As Jami just said with the people in Bhopal, it’s not just going to take people from the US to stand up and say something because it does happen all over the world. It takes the people in Canada, takes the people in India. It takes all of us. And at the end of the day, no matter what industry we’re working in, we all are human beings and we all need to love our neighbors as ourselves.

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ:  All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to take a moment to thank our incredible guests and the whole cast of amazing people who made this production possible. Thank you to our guests from Canada, Gilbert Carette, Gilles Fluet, Robert Bellefluer, and Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny. Thank you to our guests from the United States, Jami Wallace and Christina Siceloff. Thank you to the great Anne Lagacé Dowson for being our French-English interpreter for this critical panel conversation. Thank you to our wonderful voice actors, Ethan Cox and Danielle Lemieux. Thank you to Fritz Edler and Railroad Workers United for all their behind the scenes help to make this episode happen. Thank you to the brilliant Dr. Nicole Fabricant for co-hosting this episode with me and for everything that you do. Thank you to the whole team at The Real News Network and In These Times for supporting this podcast and making every single episode possible, including this one.

And a special thank you to Jules Taylor and Alina Nehlich for their remarkable work producing the episode that you just listened to, from the audio editing to the sound design. This is one of the most important episodes that we’ve ever produced, in my opinion, and it would not have been possible without Jules and Alina, nor would it have been possible without the brilliant cast of contributors and helpers that I just named. 

And of course, none of it means anything without you, all of you listening to this right now. I want to personally thank you for taking the time to listen to this special episode of our podcast. And I want to thank you for caring about this because, as the great poet Dr. Seuss once said, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” 

Listen, from Lac-Mégantic to East Palestine and beyond, from the explosion of AI data centers to the increasing number of toxic spills, fires, derailments, and other industrial disasters that are happening all around us, from the forever chemicals and other life-harming toxins in our water to the deadly carcinogens being constantly blasted into the air that we breathe, it’s clear that corporations and our governments are turning more and more of our communities into sacrifice zones and more and more of us are being set up for sacrifice. If you think it can’t happen to you and your community, neither did the people in Lac-Mégantic or East Palestine. Remember that. This crisis did not come about suddenly. It’s been building for a long time and, frankly, things are going to get worse before they get any better. 

But they can get better. We can fight this and we can fix this together. If you learn anything from these episodes that we publish, it should be that no one is coming to save us and nothing is going to change unless caring people and people of conscience everywhere start banding together and making change happen themselves, unless residents of different sacrifice zones, different poisoned and abandoned communities, workers and unions on the front lines of the industries that are poisoning us, environmental justice groups, community and faith organizations, scientists, journalists, and all others who have a stake in this fight start coming together, working together, and fighting back together.

All of us have a role to play in this fight, and we here at Working People, The Real News Network, and In These Times will continue our work to lift up the voices and stories of the people like you who are on the front lines of this fight and to bring people together on and offline. 

That is why we are going in person out to more communities affected by this. And that is why Dr. Fabricant and I will be hosting a No More Sacrifice Zones conference here at The Real News Network Studio in Baltimore at the end of this year. If you or members of your community want to attend this conference, if you want to be part of this coalition and be part of this fight, then please reach out to us using the information that we provided in the show notes for this episode.

We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, please go explore all the great work that we’re doing across The Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our different podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages. And please help us do more important work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter of our work today. I promise you guys, it really makes all the difference. 

I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.