The impenetrable mystery of the Lac Megantic rail disaster

I've been watching the news coverage of the Lac Megantic aftermath...

Nobody could see it coming...

Guess we should move those rail tracks so that when trains full of hazardous goods inexplicably explode they don't do it in the downtown of a small town near you...

What I find baffling is that nobody so far in the mainstream media has drawn the parallels with the Weyauwega disaster almost twenty years ago.

An 82 car train loaded with hazardous materials and crewed by a single employee derails in the downtown of a small town...

Sound familiar?

Not only that, but the guy who called the shots at that railroad also called the shots at the railroad that owns the Lac Megantic disaster.

His name is Ed Burkhardt, and he thinks having more than one employee aboard an 80 car train carrying hazardous goods through a small town would be a gross violation of his right to maximize profits.

I think it's safe to say that there have been plenty of folks who have protested the single-operator policy that this management imposes, and all of them feared that this could happen.

We've seen this coming since 1996.

The solution isn't to move the railway tracks.

The solution is to remove management who put profits ahead of safety.

How does a train of 72 oil tank cars and 5 locomotives have a crew of exactly one?

It's called "efficiency," my friend.

And "Fast Eddie" Burkhardt is renowned the world over for the efficiency two-step he brings to the railroads that he and his hedge fund backers have "restructured" over the years.

Step one in a Burkhardt restructuring is to prune back that inevitably "bloated" workforce.

Step two; grind down the wages of those who remain.

After all, every dollar out of a worker's pay packet is another dollar for the dividend pool.