Railway engineer may not properly have engaged handbrakes in Lac-Megantic train derailment
Simulation du déraillement Lac-Mégantic
McConnell claims Serco root company, The Electric Telegraph Company, set up the Langham Hotel telegraph office ('Mycroft?') in London with patented devices allegedly used by Paul Julius Reuter to conceal tip offs to his friends to a likely fall in the stock markets following news of the President Lincoln hit in 1865.
McConnell claims that Serco ('Mycroft?') has extended the patent pools of 1865 to cover the Wi-Fi tracking devices allegedly used by Canadian Privy Councillors Porter and Harper to deploy prison and hotel ‘guests’ at cluster crime scenes where ‘actors’ parrot scripts but no-one points out evidence of MI-3 murder-for-hire such as the Wi-Fi release of fail-safe brakes on the Lac-Mégantic train and Wi-Fi ignition of incendiary bombs on cars near the L'Eau Berge Hotel.
McConnell invites key word Googlers to read excerpts below and ask why “The List of Sherlock Innholders – The Wrist That Didn’t Bleed” book has a new title at http://www.abeldanger.net/
Prequel 1: #1839: Marine Links MI-3 Langham Onion Cipher Key to Mycroft Lincoln Hit, Serco Boston Bomb
Prequel 2: #1779: Marine Links MI-3 Innholders to Starwood Serco SATCOM and L’Eau Berge Mégantic Bombs
Mycroft ;; Government Hooker
Harper at Slave Lake
Harper at Resolute Crash
Harper at Lac-Mégantic
“Westinghouse air brake [edit]
In order to design a system without the shortcomings of the straight air system, Westinghouse invented a system wherein each piece of railroad rolling stock was equipped with an air reservoir and a triple valve, also known as a control valve.[2]
The triple valve is described as being so named as it performs three functions: Charging air into an air tank ready to be used, applying the brakes, and releasing them. In so doing, it supports certain other actions (i.e. it 'holds' or maintains the application and it permits the exhaust of brake cylinder pressure and the recharging of the reservoir during the release). In his patent application, Westinghouse refers to his 'triple-valve device' because of the three component valvular parts comprising it: the diaphragm-operated poppet valvefeeding reservoir air to the brake cylinder, the reservoir charging valve, and the brake cylinder release valve. When he soon improved the device by removing the poppet valve action, these three components became the piston valve, the slide valve, and the graduating valve.
If the pressure in the train line is lower than that of the reservoir, the brake cylinder exhaust portal is closed and air from the car's reservoir is fed into the brake cylinder to apply the brakes. This action continues until equilibrium between the brake pipe pressure and reservoir pressure is achieved. At that point, the airflow from the reservoir to the brake cylinder is lapped off and the cylinder is maintained at a constant pressure.
If the pressure in the train line is higher than that of the reservoir, the triple valve connects the train line to the reservoir feed, causing the air pressure in the reservoir to increase. The triple valve also causes the brake cylinder to be exhausted to the atmosphere, releasing the brakes.
As the pressure in the train line and that of the reservoir equalize, the triple valve closes, causing the air pressure in the reservoir and brake cylinder to be maintained at the current level.
Unlike the straight air system, the Westinghouse system uses a reduction in air pressure in the train line to apply the brakes. When the engine operator applies the brake by operating the locomotive brake valve, the train line vents to atmosphere at a controlled rate, reducing the train line pressure and in turn triggering the triple valve on each car to feed air into its brake cylinder. When the engine operator releases the brake, the locomotive brake valve portal to atmosphere is closed, allowing the train line to be recharged by the compressor of the locomotive. The subsequent increase of train line pressure causes the triple valves on each car to discharge the contents of the brake cylinder to the atmosphere, releasing the brakes and recharging the reservoirs.
Under the Westinghouse system, therefore, brakes are applied by reducing train line pressure and released by increasing train line pressure. The Westinghouse system is thus fail safe—any failure in the train line, including a separation ("break-in-two") of the train, will cause a loss of train line pressure, causing the brakes to be applied and bringing the train to a stop, thus preventing a runaway train.”
In the weeks since the Lac-Mégantic disaster, train engineer Tom Harding has joined the ranks of people left suspended in the tragedy’s aftermath — waiting for information, for money, for the bodies of loved ones, for closure.
By: Wendy Gillis News reporter, Published on Fri Sep 06 2013
FARNHAM AND LAC-MÉGANTIC, QUE.—Since the runaway MMA train hurtled down the tracks and into the heart of Lac-Mégantic in the early hours of July 6, we have seen the tally of the horror grow. Forty-seven men, women and children dead. A town, population 6,000, gutted. Dozens of residents homeless. Livelihoods — of destroyed business owners, their employees, nearly 50 MMA employees laid off in the aftermath — lost. The economies of Quebec’s rail towns threatened.
Still left to be determined is whether Tom Harding is villain or victim.
He is the engineer who parked the 72-car train two hours before the disaster. Hours later, he was in a Lac-Mégantic police station, facing a barrage of questions. Soon after, he was in hiding.
Harding’s employer, though initially hailing him as a hero who averted an even worse disaster, is blaming him: “It is an incontrovertible fact that he didn’t set adequate hand brakes on his train, although he had plenty of time to do so,” said Ed Burkhardt, the chairman of Montreal, Maine and Atlantic, in a statement to the Star on Friday.
A class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Lac-Mégantic victims calls Harding “an incompetent employee,” and accuses him of failing to apply adequate brakes, if at all.
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The community has been a popular stop-over en route to the U.S. or the Maritimes for decades, making the rail industry among the town’s biggest employers.
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Burkhardt told the Star he could not, for privacy reasons, release Harding’s safety record with the MMA but said he had “a generally decent record until the disaster.” Canadian National confirmed that Harding, as an MMA employee, was involved in a minor incident along one of its rail lines in St-Hyacinthe last summer, though a spokesperson said he could not provide details.
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In his written statement to the Star, Burkhardt responded to the criticisms, saying infrastructure had “nothing to do with the Lac-Mégantic.”
“All of MMA’s cash flow for 10 years went into infrastructure improvements — we never paid a dividend. The infrastructure met all applicable rules for the speeds at which trains operated, and was inspected repeatedly by Transport Canada.”
Following the disaster, the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration inspected all the company’s U.S. tracks and found no significant defects, Burkhardt said, adding that, prior to the Lac-Mégantic accident the company had never had a significant main line derailment in its 10-year history.
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On July 5, just after 11 p.m., Harding was x finishing his shift when he parked the MMA train — five locomotives and 72 cars carrying crude oil — in Nantes, Que. MMA engineers regularly park trains in the small community, about 10 kilometres west of Lac-Mégantic.
According to Burkhardt, Harding said that he placed 11 handbrakes. Then, as is common practice, he called a cab to take him to Lac-Mégantic.
The Transportation Safety Board says at 11:50 p.m., a rail traffic controller received a report of a fire on the locomotive. A local fire crew arrived shortly and extinguished the blaze within 10 minutes.
The Nantes fire chief told the media shortly after the derailment that his crew then shut off the engine, which MMA later blamed for releasing the brakes holding the train in place. Whether the small fire was a factor in the derailment is being investigated.
Just over an hour later, the train began its driverless descent down a gradual decline, quickly gaining momentum. The speeding train cutting through the darkness — the absence of lights the first alarming sight for witnesses — plowed into Lac-Mégantic’s downtown at 1:14 a.m.
One witness said Harding rushed out of his hotel room as chaos erupted at the L’Eau Berge bar. Catherine Pomerleau-Pelletier, a waitress there, told The Canadian Press shortly after the disaster that she saw Harding leave his room looking “very, very, very shaken up.”
“He didn’t do anything, but his face was pretty descriptive. It said everything.”
Where he went next, according to MMA, was directly to the scene of the derailment. Burkhardt said Harding used a lightweight device used to haul rail cars to pull a total of nine cars away from the disaster.
In the immediate aftermath, Burkhardt praised these actions, which may have averted further explosions. He also said Harding had followed company procedure.
It was when he arrived in Lac-Mégantic on July 10 — five days after the derailment — that Burkhardt said the incident would not have occurred if the handbrakes had been properly applied.
Hours after the derailment, Harding was taken to a Lac-Mégantic police station, where he was questioned for 10 hours — unaccompanied by a lawyer, since he was considered a witness. According to Walsh, Harding’s lawyer, the engineer was not permitted to use the washroom without a police escort, which suggests he was not being regarded solely as a witness.
Saturday night, Harding made the more than two-hour drive home to Farnham in a taxi. The driver told Rancourt, the taxi company owner, that Harding called his mother from the car, then slept the rest of the way.
“He was a man who was very exhausted,” Rancourt said.
While forensic workers began the task of identifying bodies. crews began collecting evidence.
Last month, the Transportation Safety Board wrapped up its on-site examination of the wreckage. A months-long investigative process has since begun, including reviewing 3D images of the crash, examining wreckage in the lab, reviewing data from the locomotive’s event recorder, reconstructing important parts of the disaster and conducting brake tests on both the locomotive and tanks cars being held in Nantes.
Both investigations continue, neither with an end in sight. Police cannot comment on the likelihood of charges until the probe is complete.
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Giving his town a place to gather is how Musi-Café owner Yannick Gagné feels most useful now. He lost three employees and a business he had been growing for over a decade.
Staying occupied helps. At home, alone with his thoughts, he replays the scene that night he left the bar, just 30 minutes before the disaster.
“I remember where everybody was sitting, everybody who died that night. He was in this corner, he was at the counter, he asked me to do a shot with him, it was this guy’s birthday so I paid for his shot, these guys were over here and I told them ‘See you guys, I’m off,’ more were on the patio having a cigarette, so I stopped and chatted before I left.”
Gagné had left that night to relieve the babysitter who was taking care of his young children. In just one example of how this town’s grief interconnects — weaving through families, friends and acquaintances, leaving residents mourning not one death but dozens — the sitter’s mother died at the Musi-Café.
Gagné states plainly that he has not accepted what has happened, that anger is still present, directed at Harding, yes, but not stopping there.
“The company, the driver who did not do his job, the government — everyone,” he said.
He is one of the two men named in a class action lawsuit filed just days after the crash. Harding is among the defendants in a suit that alleges, among other things, that he did not apply any or sufficient hand brakes.
The other man named in the class action suit is Guy Ouellet, who lost his partner of five years, Diane Bizier. The pair had been together at the Musi-Café that night, but Ouelett had decided to call it an early night.
…
But with jobs, businesses and industries relying on a functioning railroad as much as any other rail town, relocating the tracks too far from Lac-Mégantic could create a new disaster.
“Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed Porter head of the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) on Sept. 3, 2008, giving him access to Canada’s most carefully guarded secrets, including information shared with Canadian spies by American and British intelligence agencies. In June 2010, Harper made him chairman of the five-member committee. SIRC’s job is to review operations of Canada’s spy agency, CSIS, by providing civilian oversight of operations and handling appeals from citizens who feel they have been mistreated by the agency. He stepped down amid controversy in 2011.”
“Arthur Porter tried to broker multimillion-dollar gun deal while serving as Canada’s spy watchdog
Brian Hutchinson | July 11, 2013 | Last Updated: Jul 24 4:44 PM ET
More from Brian Hutchinson | @hutchwriter
More from Brian Hutchinson | @hutchwriter
Gerhard Baur seldom has visitors to his little factory in Alfred, a country village nestled halfway between Ottawa and Montreal, on the Ontario side of the river. So when a silver, late model Mercedes coupe turned onto his driveway, he wondered who could be calling.
Mr. Baur makes guns. Restricted firearms, including semi-automatics. Pistols, military-grade assault rifles, sniper rifles, and more. Mr. Baur says he can make just about any weapon. “Send me into the bush with a Coke can and a screwdriver, and I’ll come back with a tank,” he boasts.
He has long dreamed of taking his five-year-old company, Canstar Arms Development Corporation, “to the next level.” He wants to replace his small production facility with a state-of-the-art weapons and ammunition manufacturing plant. He says he just needs a partner, a real player. He thought he might have landed one, that summer day in 2010.
The Mercedes stopped, and the driver stepped out. He looked all business. Suit and bow tie, expensive watch. He presented himself as a globe-trotting networker and corporate executive. “He was very charming,” recalls Mr. Baur. So began his unlikely, maddening relationship with Arthur T. Porter.
He made it seem like he only had to pick up the phone and tomorrow you’ve got $100-million in your bank account.
Dr. Porter didn’t mention that he was, at the time, director general of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), one of Canada’s largest public health-care providers, Mr. Baur says. Nor did Dr. Porter reveal that he was a personal advisor to the president of Sierra Leone, and “ambassador plenipotentiary” for the African country.
And Dr. Porter didn’t disclose that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had just appointed him chairman of the Security and Intelligence Review Committee, the powerful civilian body that examines the activities of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. Mr. Baur says he did not learn about any of that until much later.
Dr. Porter examined some of his weapons. He seemed impressed. He said he could bring some investors on board, recalls Mr. Baur. All he needed from Mr. Baur was a formal business plan.
Dr. Porter also suggested that he consider building the new gun and ammunition factory in Africa, says Mr. Baur.
“He would find investors, and I could have a new facility, all the machinery, whatever I needed,” recalls Mr. Baur. “I was told there were hundreds of millions of dollars available. He made it seem like he only had to pick up the phone and tomorrow morning you’ve got $100-million in your bank account.”
Mr. Baur spent months working on his business plan for Dr. Porter. For the next three years, Mr. Baur says, they kept talking, meeting on two occasions at Dr. Porter’s luxury condo in Montreal. Their most recent encounter was in February this year, at Dr. Porter’s private retreat in the Bahamas. It was there, sitting poolside, that Mr. Baur says Canada’s former spy watchdog promised to hand over a cheque for $380,000, enough money to buy some specialized gun-making equipment.
He recalls talk of how much they might both profit from the manufacture of arms and weapons components. “He said he wanted to make sure that his family is set up,” recalls Mr. Baur. “Then he just disappeared.”
He’d just disappear for weeks and months at a time.
Two weeks after their meeting in the Bahamas, Canadian authorities charged Dr. Porter and three other men with numerous criminal offences including fraud, breach of trust and document forgery. The charges relate to a $1.3-billion MUHC contract, awarded during Dr. Porter’s tenure, to an international consortium led by scandal-plagued SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. Two additional men have since been charged. It is alleged that Dr. Porter was involved in an illegal kickback scheme with former SNC-Lavalin executives, and that $22.5-million was funnelled to a Bahamian-registered company, in return for the lucrative construction and maintenance contract.
Dr. Porter has said he’s done nothing wrong. The charges have not been tested in court.”
“CSEC and Harper Government Assert Right to Spy on Canadians
By Keith Jones
Global Research, February 04, 2014
With the government’s full support, the Communication Security Establishment Canada (CSEC)—the Canadian partner and counterpart of the US National Security Agency (NSA)—has illegally arrogated the power to spy on Canadians.
Responding Friday to the latest revelations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, CSEC baldly declared that it has the unfettered right to systematically collect and analyze the metadata from Canadians’ electronic communications—that is from their telephone calls, texts, e-mail messages, and Internet use.
Like the NSA, CSEC is advancing a pseudo-legal argument to justify its flagrant violation of Canadians’ privacy rights. This argument revolves around a spurious distinction between the “content” of a communication and the metadata generated by it. The latter, claims CSEC, is not constitutionally protected because it is merely a “wrapping” or “envelope.” Metadata can, therefore, be accessed, preserved and analyzed by the state at will. That is, in the absence of any reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing and without CSEC needing to obtain a judicial warrant.
CSEC “is legally authorized to collect and analyze metadata,” declared a terse press release issued by Canada’s eavesdropping agencyFriday. “In simple terms, metadata is technical information used to route communications, and not the contents of a communication.”
Based on this antidemocratic assertion, the CSEC statement goes on to claim that a pilot NSA-CSEC program that involved the collection and analysis of the metadata of all Wi-Fi traffic at a Canadian airport during a two-week period in 2012 was completely in accordance with the blanket legal ban on CSEC spying on the communications of people in Canada, unless authorized by a court-issued warrant.
“No Canadian or foreign travellers were tracked,” claimed CSEC. “No Canadian communications were, or are, targeted, collected or used.”
This is doublespeak. Since at least 2004, CSEC has been spying on Canadians’ communications through the systematic collection and analysis of metadata.
In the case of the NSA-CSEC pilot project, the 27-slide CSEC PowerPoint presentation leaked by Snowden to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) boasts that the new program the spy agencies were testing enabled them to trace the subsequent Wi-Fi communications of those swept up in their surveillance of an unnamed “mid-size” Canadian airport for up to two weeks. The metadata from their communications was collected and their movements reconstructed as they accessed Wi-Fi’s at hotels, cafes, libraries and other airports in Canada and the US.
What is this if not spying?
The CSEC statement went on to make various claims as to the legality of its metadata mining operations. Such spying, it contended, is authorized under the National Defence Act and by ministerial directives and has been approved by the CSEC Commissioner, an ostensible “watchdog” who works hand-in-glove with CSEC and reports to the Defence Minister.
The reality is that CSEC’s operations are shrouded in complete secrecy—an antidemocratic framework conducive to illegal assertions of executive power. It functions on the basis of directives issued by the Minister of Defence. The contents of these directives and even their subjects are known only to a handful of cabinet ministers and a cabal of national security officials.
The ministerial directives that authorize CSEC’s metadata mining programs have never been publicly released, let alone approved by parliament and their legality tested in the courts.
We do know, thanks to a series of reports published by the Globe and Mailsince last June, that CSEC has been metadata mining Canadians’ communications for at least a decade. The initial Globe report was largely based on a secret 2009 ministerial directive that gave CSEC continued authorization for at least one of its metadata mining programs and sought to provide legal cover for this by invoking the claim that metadata is not constitutionally protected communication.
In response to this and other revelations—many of them coming from documents leaked by Snowden and showing that CSEC functions as a veritable arm and subcontractor of the NSA in its global spying operations—CSEC and the Conservative government have made numerous pro forma declarations affirming CSEC’s adherence to the law. Canadians have been repeatedly told that CSEC’s operations target “foreign threats” and that it cannot and does not scrutinize Canadians’ communications without court authorization.
The World Socialist Web Site repeatedly warned that these statements were disinformation and lies. In particular, we pointed to the evidence that CSEC was seeking to circumvent the legal and constitutional restrictions on it spying on Canadians by asserting that metadata is not part of an electronic “communication.”
The significance of Friday’s statement is that never before has CSEC so forthrightly admitted to the Canadian public that it is collecting and analyzing the metadata of their communications and asserted—in flagrant contradiction with the privacy rights guaranteed in the country’s constitution—that it has the power to do so.
While the CSEC statement did not repeat this argument, the spy agency and the Conservative government have repeatedly suggested that metadata is innocuous technical information—which begs the question as to why massive state resources are being expended to collect and analyze it and to perfect dragnet surveillance programs.
Through metadata mining the state can develop intimate profiles of individuals and groups. Metadata is “way more powerful than the content of communications,” University of Toronto professor and cyber-security specialist Ron Deibert told the CBC. “You can tell a lot more about people, their habits, their relationships, their friendships, even their political beliefs.”
CSEC’s metadata spying was first authorized by the Liberal government of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin and has been expanded under its successor, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.
On Friday, Defence Minister Rob Nicholson stuck to the government script, insisting that CSEC’s operations are lawful and repeating its tendentious claims that metadata mining doesn’t constitute spying on Canadians’ communications. CSEC, declared Nicholson, “made it clear to CBC that nothing in the documents that they had obtained showed that Canadian communications were targeted, collected, or used, nor that travellers’ movements were tracked.”
Canada’s opposition parties have aided and abetted the government’s attempt to cover up the illegal spying being conducted by CSEC. In the seven months prior to last Friday, they had asked only a handful of questions in parliament about the revelations concerning CSEC and refused to either alert Canadians to the significance of CSEC’s metadata mining or its pivotal role in the NSA’s illegal global spying network.
On Friday, some MPs from the trade union-supported New Democratic Party and the Liberals did characterize CSEC’s spying as illegal. But as defenders of big business and the capitalist state, they will not mount any serious effort to expose the illegal operations of CSEC, let alone demonstrate the connection between the emergence of police state spying, ever widening social inequality, and the drive of all sections of the elite to make the working class pay for the capitalist crisis through wage and job cuts and the dismantling of public services.”
“Inmate at ‘deplorable’ Panama prison describes life with his new ‘MVP’ cellmate, Arthur Porter
Brian Hutchinson | June 1, 2013 3:22 AM ET
More from Brian Hutchinson | @hutchwriter
More from Brian Hutchinson | @hutchwriter
Inmate at ‘deplorable’ Panama prison describes life with his new ‘MVP’ cellmate, Arthur Porter.
Accused of multiple crimes at home including fraud and money laundering, the former chairman of Canada’s spy review committee is now languishing inside one of Central America’s biggest and most violent prisons, where he’s attracting notice from other inmates.
“The Wiseguy, what I will call our new fella,” an inmate tweeted [WARNING: He has posted gruesome prison images] from Panama’s La Joya penitentiary on Friday, hours after Arthur Porter, 56, was transferred to the notorious facility. Dr. Porter spent most of the week in somewhat more refined custody with Panamanian police. He was apprehended in Panama Sunday on international arrest warrants with his 53-year-old wife Pamela, who was placed in a jail for women.
“Our pavilion has had all sorts; Crooked crooks, Traficantes, Mulas, Big Bosses, Kingpins, Dr. Death (harvested organs & sold on black market),” the inmate added, referring to his prison unit, reserved for foreigners. “They place Porter 1 degree of separation from a pair of notorious 1980s figures: the Lockerbie bomber & Ex Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.”
Our pavilion has had all sorts; Crooked crooks, Traficantes, Mulas, Big Bosses, Kingpins, Dr. Death
He went on to describe Dr. Porter’s rudimentary new accommodations. “We’ve finally gotten him a bed. But he has to manage sleeping on the floor as the pavilion is overcrowded. Doubt if he can fit into hammocks.” The inmate was reached via email Friday night. He asked that his name not be published.
The Porters were stopped by police at Tocumen International Airport near Panama City, after travelling from Nassau, Bahamas, where they have maintained a residence for years, and where Dr. Porter exiled himself after his troubles emerged in Montreal.
“Arthur is here, spoken with him, apparently, seems his wife was arrested with him, if she was detained, she will be in the female prison,” the inmate told the National Post, a few hours after Dr. Porter arrived at La Joya. He was processed and put in the foreigners unit, which the inmate describes as filthy, over-crowded and dangerous. “But Arthur is here and we are looking out for a bedspace for him, as he seems to have health complications; uses breathing aid.”
The inmate indicates that he’s been inside La Joya prison for four years. He has access to the Internet and to wireless communications. He has blogged and tweeted about brutal conditions inside La Joya, describing incidents of violence and prisoner neglect.
“We have quite a handful of appliances here; corruptions!” he wrote in an email. He then resumed tweeting about his new “MVP” cellmate.
Dr. Porter was appointed chairman of the Security and Intelligence Review Committee by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2010, but resigned a year later after a National Post investigation revealed several of his curious business affairs. A few weeks later he resigned as director general of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) one of Canada’s largest public health care providers.”
Yours sincerely,
Field McConnell, United States Naval Academy, 1971; Forensic Economist; 30 year airline and 22 year military pilot; 23,000 hours of safety; Tel: 715 307 8222
David Hawkins Tel: 604 542-0891 Forensic Economist; former leader of oil-well blow-out teams; now sponsors Grand Juries in CSI Crime and Safety Investigation
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