(The Canadian Press distributed the following article on January 15.)
WHITBY, Ont. — A woman and her niece were killed instantly when containers from a derailed freight train toppled over a bridge and crushed their van, police said Thursday.
At the request of the victims’ family, police didn’t release the names of the victims, a 19-year-old Keswick woman and her aunt, a 36-year-old Whitby woman, at an afternoon news conference in nearby Oshawa.
But they provided some details of the accident.
“The van was owned by the 19-year-old Keswick woman and we believe she was operating the van at the time of the incident,” said Sgt. Paul Malik of Durham regional police.
Brock Winter, vice president of field operations for CP Rail, flew in from Calgary for the news conference.
Winter said it’s “premature to speculate” if extremely cold weather played a part in the derailment.
“We operate in cold weather all the time. It’s part of how we operate at CP Rail,” Winter said.
The derailment occurred Wednesday evening in the midst of a snowstorm when two flat-deck cars containing paper and other boxed consumer goods went off the tracks, sending 14 massive containers down an embankment to the road below.
About half of the containers – six metres wide and 12 metres long – tumbled down the embankment to the road, some of them spilling their contents as they spun to the ground, said CP Rail spokesman Paul Thurston.
The cargo posed no danger to the public and there was no need to evacuate the residential area that surrounds the four-lane road.
The train was en route to Toronto from the Port of Montreal when the derailment took place.
Malik said it would take crews days to clean up the mess left by the derailment.
“We want to advise residents living in the area that crews will be operating heavy machinery over the next few days to remove the debris and begin reconstruction,” he said.