Anyone who isn’t living under a rock knows that Calgary has experienced an unprecedented flood on both the Bow and Elbow rivers. While the water is down to manageable levels now and cleanup is proceeding at a staggering pace, the state of emergency persists and a large chunk of the downtown core is still without power, not to mention low lying areas outside the core.
In the wake of all this, at roughly 4:00 this morning, some genius at Canadian Pacific Railway thought it would be a good idea to run a loaded freight train across a bridge that is well over a century old (probably over 125 years). Ordinarily, this would not be a particularly dangerous thing but given the unprecedented flooding and the fact that the Bow river is still running very high, the logic of this decision totally escapes me. I suspect this is the sort of decision that controllers have gotten away with many times over the years with questionable structures surviving by pure fluke. Alas, that was not to be the case today. The bridge started to callapse as the train had mostly finished passing over the bridge. Clearly the bridge was not sound and from the descriptions of the failure, it sounds like one of the bridge piers was undermined and the weight and vibration of the train’s passage caused whatever was still holding the pier up to collapse. Of course, once that happened, the river flow would have ensured it continued to collapse.
So the question then becomes why did the city allow the bridge to be used? After all, it is within the city limits. Well, it turns out that the city has no authority over railroads at all. That’s right. Zero. None. The city cannot even enforce noise bylaws or bar trains from blocking intersections during rush hour. It further turns out that even the province can do nothing. Apparently railroads are only beholden to the federal government and its agencies. What that means is that the city had no authority or access to inspect any of the rail bridges or to bar the railroad from operating trains. Yet it turns out that within the city limits, the city is responsible for the safety and response to any problems caused by railroads.
So, not only is the city still dealing with the aftermath of an unprecedented flood, but it also has to deal with the aftermath of a bone headed decision by a flunky working for a private company over which the city has no authority whatsoever. Thanks to this #nenshinoun, the city has to divert resources from handling the flood cleanup to dealing with this secondary crisis.
It seems clear now that regulatory reform is absolutely required. Make railroads beholden to the same municipalities that other transportation companies are. Let the municipalities manage all infrastructure in their boundaries instead of everything except the railways. After all, municipalities are uniquely qualified to manage infrastructure in their geographic areas. Furthermore, allow the provincial transportation departments to enforce their regulations as well. No mroe of this incomplete oversight from the federal authorities who are either understaffed or simply not competent to the job.
Update 19:11. The bridge is actually 101 years old according to current news reports. It was also apparently inspected several times before the train was driven across it. It seems I was also correct in assuming that it was a failure at the bottom of a bridge pier, which, to be fair, there is no way they could have seen it in an inspection. However, since they apparently didn’t even know that the neighbouring bridge was not connected at the foundations, it is clear that they should not have been opening the bridge until they could inspect the foundations. After all, if you don’t even know what is connected together, how do you know the foundations of the bridge are still sound? Calgary was able to have some certainty about its bridges because they are anchored into actual bedrock. Any bridge not so anchored probably should be considered suspect after such a flood as we have had.