This may have been discussed here before, if so direct me to thread. I have been gone awhile.
The cost of the Quebec wreck has to be astronomical. given property and people losses. I can’t believe there is enough insurance to cover this, even spread among the potential entities that may be held liable. Has there been an estimate yet on the total cost to make whole the situation? There has to be a max on ins coverage carried by any business, be it CP or MM&A or the shipper or anybody else. I am pretty old and I can’t ever remember a rr accident even close to these porportions. But, I have to add, I never thought BP was flush enough to cover the Gulf oil spill, but they did it and never squawked. Thanks.
Probably larger than the property damage and direct claims for death and injury will be the damage that this does to the rail oil shipping business in the form of new regulations. This will be the most costly train wreck in history.
Well that could rival the MM&A runaway alright. But it depends on to what degree you believe the PTC mandate arose just from Chatsworth. The fundamentals for that the PTC mandate have been in place for a long time, and Chatsworth was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The MM&A disaster calls for fundamentals that have hardly been contemplated yet. So that one wreck alone will trigger massive change. But still, the change may not rise to the cost level of the PTC mandate. I just expect the showrooms to be full of some brand new high performance oil trains-- oil trains with bells on.
In addition to the fire damage, there is the environmental damage from spilled oil which didn’t burn up and soaked into the ground. It may take years to clean up.
My post was meant to deal mainly with the masive losses (total not calculated yet, I know) that will be from this incident compared to the dollar value of insurance in place at the time of the event , and that I, personally, doubt that there will be enough insurance in force to cover the actual total cost, even if several entities are found liable. And to ask if anything in this vein has been mentioned. When you run out of insurance, they go after assets. Could break a small railroad, I would think.
I understand that this incident will have repercussions on future rail operations. May have already started (2 man crews min).
Who pays? The cost of the environmental cleanup is going to take first priority. This will probably come from the insurance coverage. After that provincial then municipal claims. After that the claims by individuals and businesses harmed. My prediction the individuals and businesses will probably only get all their money out of MM&A if the railroad stays in business and is sold to CP or CN. In bankruptcy the nominal owners Rail World would be replaced by a creditors committee. Without knowing how much liability insurance the carrier had it is difficult to say. Most companies the size of Rail World usually carry catastrophic coverage to manage as much risk as possible. This is why I was kind of puzzled by the cleanup companies comments about not being paid. I was told that with haz mat accidents the first thing the cleanup company checks is the insurance carrier. This way the company doing the cleanup knows where to go to get payed. The province or state paying is usually a last resort and typically they pay when the source of a spill has not been identified or is otherwise unable to pay. Rgds IGN
One other comment. The Chatsworth wreck. In that case the contract operator and Metrolink payed. The only fight there was how much the deceased victims livelihood was worth. Rgds IGN
Just a guess here, but who ever owned the oil at the time of accident (either the oil producer, refinery, or a third party) will be on the hook for whatever isn’t covered by the railroad. This settlement and the costs associated will go deep, very deep.
No responsible people involved with the investigation, the company or the FD have even suggested eco-terrorism was a possibility. And no eco-terrorist groups have claimed responsibility. So, what you claim as a ‘What if?’ is not a hypothetical, which implies some factual basis, even if unlikely. . It is pure fantasy.
No outside entity would buy MM&A and assume this liability. And it is possible that Rail World and others may be insulated from the resulting claims; depends upon the corporate arrangements and contract language. If I had to guess, I would say that there will not be enough ins coverage to fully satisfy all claims. If this is the case, then bankruptcy would usually follow. The cost of the NS accident in SC at the Avondale siding had to be tremendous. The final settlement was not made public, but Avondale must have gotten well on it; they shut down their complete multi-plant operation. That NS event, in my opinion, pales in comparison to the MM&A wreck.
Balt does make a valid point. If, and it’s a very big if, eco-terrorists were indeed responsible they would be very foolish to announce they were involved because they would be hunted down and prosecuted. OTOH, regardless of the cause they now have ammunition for future battles. I would also suspect if there was evidence leading investigators to believe there was outside involvement they would remain silent on the matter while they tracked the suspects down. It’s a tenet of police work that you don’t let the bad guys know you are looking for them.
Even in the case of sabotage, unless the saboteurs had money, the cost for the cleanup will be borne first by the railroad and carrier’s insurance, then by the shipper and receiver. Damages outside of the environmental damages, ie payment for funeral expenses, wrongful death, pain and suffering, destruction of property is solely on the carrier, if any money is left after the cleanup costs. The cost of the Graniteville wreck was not anywhere as bad as this. Mostly Graniteville was a release of a gas. Very little hazardous waste if any to cleanup. The damage there was death and the victims who breathed the gas. Also SC law has provisions in law that mandate arbitration when the defendant acknowledges liability. NS stepped up to the plate right away and did not quibble over paying hospital bills. It nice when a company has lots of assets and is trying to be a good citizen in a bad situation. Now how many people remember. Rgds IGN
Terrorists almost always claim credit for their actions because that is how terror works. If you look at the history of terror, whether the IRA, al qaeda, or whoever, the terror works by taking credit and immobilizing the public.
The so-called eco terrorism that would have a motive for causing an oil train disaster would not need to claim credit if they caused such a disaster. Furthermore, they would be ill served by claiming credit. Their purpose is to draw attention to the public safety risk of shipping oil by train in the hope that public pressure will slow down or stop such shipping.
So an oil train disaster would help their cause, but letting the public know that they caused the disaster by sabotage would undermine the premise that shipping oil by rail is dangerous. Of course it is dangerous in the case of sabotage, but they want the public to believe it is dangerous as a normal operation without any sabotage.
I would say that even if it is proven that the runaway was caused by the engineer failing to set sufficient handbrakes, the disaster is a great benefit in proving the exact danger that the anti-oil protestors have been warning about and predicting.
Oil trains, ethyl alcohol trains, anhydrous ammonia and other hazmat trains are dangerous to folks living near them. Ask older residents of Decatur Illinois and other towns about that… It is absurd to keep blaming this disaster on folks who believe some forms of oil are dangerous to transport, in pipelines as well, just because you have your own agenda in this entire disaster.
Oh I am not blaming the disaster on anybody. If you think I have, please show me where. My comment was only meant to explain why I see no reason to rule out any one possible cause for the disaster. If the cause is not known, how can one rule out a possible cause?
I take a different tack because not blaming anyone can mean that nobody learns anything. Again:
The desk dispatcher or trainmaster should have insured that the train was inspected and then watched by a responsible person after the locomotive fire was put out.
The Firechief should not have allowed the train to be left unmanned after the fire. Not his responsibility, but certainly a matter of good judgement.
The bystander who saw the train moving without lights should have reported it.
The MM&A rules for unmanned parked trains should have been more specific and more safety conscious. Not just an MM&A management problem, but also a government regulation problem.
All this applies whether or not terrorism was involved.