?I just want to ensure people that we have everything under control,? t he mayor said. He blamed the flooding on years of overspending on frivolous projects and lack of attention to rebuilding the city?s infrastructure.
He wants to "ensure people" - is this some strange left pondian usage?
"everything under control" also seems a very bold claim under the circumstances - I'd hate to see what out of control looked like!
I expect airbags do go off if you slam into a wall of water at 40mph. They might also go off if the right bit of wiring harness gets wet. I have lost a mudflap once in a flash flood. Certain cars like Renault Meganes with low air intakes tend to end up bobbing up and down in the local deep car trap if they try to go through after a bad storm. The engine is usually a total writeoff and the car pretty messy inside too.
Yesterday I drove (very slowly) through 2+ feet of muddy water running sideways like a river across the road.. not nice, and not where you'd expect it. They had to rescue ~1,000 people from a commuter train with rafts. Most intense rainfall ever recorded (~5" in 2-3 hours). I've seen some sh*t in the last 24 hours..
? the mayor said. He blamed the flooding on years of overspending on friv olous projects and lack of attention to rebuilding the city?s infrastruct ure.
Latest headline "Tampering alleged in fiery Quebec train crash" , the Lac-M egantic calamity. Seems someone was tampering with at least one locomotive after the train was parked for the night. Wow, Canada is such a great place , hardly any crime, huh.
snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:
From one news headline published this morning: The chairman of the company whose train exploded in downtown Lac- Mégantic says he is certain it was tampered with.
A later headline: Firefighters in the nearby town of Nantes put out a separate blaze on the train shortly before it crashed into Lac-Megantic early Saturday. Ed Burkhardt, chief executive officer and president of Rail World, the parent company of the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, told media outlets there's evidence the engine powering the brakes was shut down at some point.
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Pressed to elaborate by CTV, Burkhardt wrote Tuesday in an e-mail exchange, "We are now aware the firefighters shut down the locomotive.
So the firemen are guilty of tampering with a badly maintained locomotive by putting out a fire.
It will be interesting to get more details as the investigation continues. I was not fully familiar with the Westinghouse air brake system so I read up on it:
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The individual car brakes should be applied automatically if the pressure in the main brake line drops below a certain threshold, and each car has its own reservoir of compressed air to exert maximum force on the brakes. However, if the valve between, say, the engine and the cars is closed, the system will be "fooled", as happened in the infamous accident in DC in
1953:
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I think rail cars also have the old-fashioned manual parking brakes actuated by a handwheel, which should have been used if the train was parked for any length of time. But people are lazy and crews are sparse, so this was probably not done. There are also wheel chocks that would have prevented
this.
Although sabotage and terrorism have been so far not suspected, this may
have been an attempt to push for the Keystone pipeline which would reduce the rail transport of crude oil across Canada, to the less risky (for Canada) of having it pumped across the US to refineries and ships in the
Gulf of Mexico where it will be taken to foreign customers. The benefits of this pipeline to the US are minimal and temporary in the form of local jobs, but the environmental impact of the inevitable oil spills could be disastrous.
Seems like an awful lot of accidents lately (the airliner crash in SF), as well as a lot of extreme weather like the deluge in Toronto and disasters like the deadly CO wildfires. AGW? End of Days?
The original fire was arson. And since when does a fire occur in a componen t of 7500 tons of freight payload, parked on a slope, and the train company doesn't bother to come and check the situation until the next morning???
Enough evidence has been discovered to start a criminal investigation. This was no accident. From USA Today: Quebec police Inspector Michel Forget said that investigators have "discove red elements" that have led to a criminal probe. He gave no details but rul ed out terrorism.
s
SFO- another minimalist Boeing design delaying alarms and other pilot warni ng until 1.5 seconds before crash...ummmm, talk about next to worthless.
Over 2 feet! Do you have any idea of how dangerous that was? Were you in a 4WD truck or a passenger car? Most cars will start to lift off their tires in over 2 feet of water and be swept away. It happens all the time.
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