It was all hands on deck to extinguish a fire in the rail yard in Smithers this morning, March 21.
According to a spokesperson from CN, crews noticed smoke coming from a rail car loaded with petcoke described as a non-dangerous inert by-product of the oil refining process.
Local emergency services were called and dispatched to assist.
Smithers Deputy Fire Chief Alle Jan de Vries said 17 members from the Smithers Fire Department and five from the Telkwa department attended.
“We had five apparatus respond: 1 ladder truck, 1 engine, 1 command unit and 2 water tenders, including one from Telkwa,” he said.
“We had a single rail car involved. We were able to fill the rail car completely with water which extinguished the fire,” de Vries continued.
“This fire was relatively small, yet it took 20,000 gallons to extinguish, but it was well within our capacity. However, with the types of hazardous materials moving through Smithers a large-scale rail event would quickly go beyond our fire fighting capacity.”
There were no injuries or other active fires reported nor any impact to CN operations.
The cause of the incident is under investigation.
Meanwhile, Skeena Bulkley Valley MP Taylor Bachrach took to Facebook to thank the fire departments for their quick work.
“With the volume of dangerous goods moving through our communities, it could have been much worse,” he wrote. “Our communities are vulnerable to rail fires and emergency response capacity is limited.”
He added that he thinks rail disasters shouldn’t fall on volunteers’ shoulders, nor on municipal taxpayers.
“CN is a multi-billion-dollar corporation. The federal government should require companies like CN and CP to fully fund emergency response along their rail corridors. As Lac Megantic and East Palestine, Ohio showed, the worst case can be devastating,” he concluded. “I’ll keep pushing the federal government to properly protect our communities. In the meantime, I’m grateful to all local firefighters who dedicate themselves to protecting their neighbours.”
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@MariscaDekkema
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