An employee of the rail company involved in a fatal 2018 derailment in northern Manitoba told an inquest Friday he had no idea how serious the situation was until he arrived at the scene and had to help first responders get to two men trapped inside the train.

Roadmaster Allan Chapman said he was working on a different section of tracks when he was called to help because the Hudson Bay Railway employee assigned to regularly inspect the section where the derailment happened was out of town the weekend of the incident. 

Kevin Anderson, who was 38, died after the freight train he was conducting went over a washed-out section of rail in a remote area of northern Manitoba and derailed on Sept. 15, 2018, pinning him and engineer Chris Rushton in the wreckage.

The rails and ties were in place, but were hanging over an empty space 15 metres long and almost five metres deep, a Transportation Safety Board report said. It collapsed under the weight of the train.

“After we loaded Mr. Rushton onto the helicopter, I seen [first responders] getting ready to leave, putting their stuff away,” Chapman told the inquest. “I said, ‘What about the other person?’ And they said, ‘He’s gone.'”

Chapman, who has worked on railways for decades, said derailments can vary widely and many aren’t as serious. However, no one told him this one involved two people pinned inside the train until he arrived at the scene.

“Had you known that, would it have changed your response in any way?” asked Abram Silver, counsel for Anderson’s family. “Could you have done something different?”

“Probably, yeah,” said Chapman, who testified he was told to stop for a rail saw to bring to the remote location, and had to make sure the seldom-used tool was working, fuel his vehicle and stop for food before heading out.

“I probably would have tried to get some other crews, crew members, to be ready to head to the site … as early as I could.”

The inquest into Anderson’s death heard Chapman ended up having to drive first responders to the derailment scene after the tires blew out on the ATVs they tried to use to get there.

Both men in the train were seriously injured but had no way of communicating with the outside world, because their radios weren’t working. They were discovered by chance about two hours after the derailment when a civilian helicopter happened to fly overhead, the province previously said in a news release.

While RCMP got to the scene around 7 p.m., access to the site was barred until it could be assessed by trained and equipped personnel due to concerns about fuel leaking from the wreckage. Emergency personnel didn’t get to the scene until much later.

An autopsy report said Anderson bled to death after suffering “serious but survivable injuries.” However, the medical opinion on whether he could have survived later changed to his death being inevitable given the circumstances, a lawyer in the inquest previously said. 

No derailment emergency response plan

Both Chapman and Gerald Krahn, who was a transport supervisor with the railway at the time of the incident, told the inquest on Friday they did not believe there was anything in the company’s emergency response plan about derailments at the time.

Krahn testified the company did introduce a new procedure following the derailment, which required train crews to report to the rail traffic controller every hour. Failure to do that, he said, required their supervisor to investigate. 

Krahn also told the inquest he felt “absolutely nothing” could have been done differently in the response to the derailment. 

While he agreed with lawyer Silver that having a gas sniffer tool to determine whether gas has leaked out of a train car “would definitely help,” he said railway employees would still have to wait for the right crews with hazmat capabilities to arrive on scene.

“We just left it up to the professionals,” he said.

Krahn said while he wasn’t involved in any discussions at the scene about notifying the men’s families that they were pinned inside the train, in the future he would “absolutely” suggest the families be notified promptly and appropriately.

David Schafer, who was Manitoba’s fire commissioner at the time of the derailment, told the inquest on Wednesday that while there is a cache of additional rescue tools with the heavy urban search and rescue team in Brandon, Man., those would have taken at least 12 hours to transport to the site by road, along with trained personnel. 

Schafer said while it would be possible to stage an additional set of similar tools somewhere farther north such as Thompson, Man., it’s not as simple as it might seem.

“They have to be maintained and ready for use when the time comes,” Schafer said. “It’s a difficult question to answer because of personnel and turnover in different communities, and whether they can maintain the training with the responders that they have.”

When asked Friday what the case was for maintaining those resources in Brandon, current fire commissioner Ryan Schenk told the inquest the team is responsible for both Manitoba and Saskatchewan. As a result, it was established and maintained in Brandon to ensure it was centralized for both provinces, Schenk said.  

The inquest before provincial court Judge Timothy Killeen in The Pas, Man., is scheduled to continue next week.

Its purpose includes determining the circumstances surrounding Anderson’s death, and reviewing the co-ordination of a multi-agency response to a serious incident in a remote setting.