‘I still see flames,’ says resident more than 24 hours after CP train derailed in Sask.
A Saskatchewan woman who lives next to the site of a CP train derailment says a fire is still burning more than 24 hours later.
Melanie Loessl lives just south of Highway 16, near Guernsey, where the train carrying crude oil jumped the tracks shortly after midnight on Monday, causing an enormous blaze.
Nobody was injured and CP said in an update Monday afternoon that there was no impact to waterways. The stretch of Highway 16 near the site was still closed to traffic as of 7:30 a.m. CST Tuesday.
However, further details from authorities about the incident and the status of the fire suppression and cleanup were scant early Tuesday morning.
In a note sent out Monday afternoon, the Saskatchewan government estimated firefighters still had eight to 10 hours of work left to suppress the fire.
«I still see flames,» Loessl said early Tuesday. «There’s lots of smoke.»
‘Crews out there working hard’
Loessl’s driveway runs parallel to the train tracks. She said the flames are less intense today.
«There’s a few times this morning that I’ve seen them going higher. I’m not sure if that’s because they’re moving stuff or what. But there’s lots of smoke yet.
«I see a lot of crews out there working hard.»
Loessl said she saw camps of workers with gravel trucks, backhoes, graders and overhead lights.
«There’s so much equipment going on out there. Some of the [train] cars that were burned in the daylight, I saw some of them had oil on the outside of them that had burned.»
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) said Tuesday that for safety reasons, its investigators had not yet gone onto the site.
Further updates from the TSB were expected later Tuesday.
Loessl said she’s wondering about the cause of the derailment. She said she saw maintenance work done to the train track this past fall.
Watch video of Monday’s blaze shot by Loessl:
