MONCTON – When Clayton McCullum, a volunteer firefighter from Sussex, N.B. heard about last night’s train derailment in Wapske, it hit close to home for him.
“Makes you think what is going through here at night ya know. There’s a lot of stuff that is scary,” he said.
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Last week, CN Rail provided the town a list of the hazardous materials that rolled directly through it from June 2012 to June 2013.
Scott Hatcher, the chief administrative officer for Sussex, said it was a real eye-opener.
Steve Newson, a policy adviser for the Nova Scotia Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal, said regardless of what a train is carrying, rail transport has a good overall safety record.
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“What moves in Nova Scotia is container traffic from Montreal to the port of Halifax. There is not as much in the was a dangerous goods,” he said. “There are no crude oil trains in Nova Scotia. ”
But in Sussex, more than 17,000 rail cars loaded down with hazardous goods like petroleum and propane passed though an area where more than 4,000 people work and live.
Many volunteer firefighters are not properly trained to deal with hazardous materials, but since the fatal Lac-Megantic rail disaster, that has been changing.
Hatcher says a derailment in his town “would be catastrophic, not only for our community, but for our resources.”
Since December, CN has been providing Sussex emergency responders with specialized training to deal with potential derailments.
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