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Vol. 81/No. 27 July 25, 2017
DC fundraiser backs framed-up Quebec rail workers
Militant/Madhu DurgaSrihari
WASHINGTON — Some 70 rail workers, union activists and others attended a
benefit for locomotive engineer Tom Harding and dispatcher Richard
Labrie, two framed-up rail workers facing trial in September. They’re
charged with responsibility for the deaths of 47 people when an unmanned
train carrying highly flammable shale oil rolled into Lac-Mégantic,
Quebec, derailed and exploded in 2013. Participants heard remarks on the
stakes of their fight and enjoyed an evening of “Music for Safe Rails
and Sustainable Communities,” featuring the U-Liners, at the Dew Drop
Inn here July 9.
“The funds we raise are important, but second to the political defense
we must wage. Harding and Labrie did not cause what happened. The
charges against them should be dropped,” said Fritz Edler, who organized
the benefit. He is a retired Washington, D.C., Amtrak locomotive
engineer and member of Rail Workers United. “The Canadian government and
railroad owners are fighting to have history regard them as well in
control of rail safety, justly disciplining the bad apples that cause
all accidents. We can’t accept that.”
Jean Demaitre, manager of train operations for the now-bankrupt
Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, faces similar charges.
“What’s at stake in their case is the fight over crew sizes,” Bill
Broadus, 52, an Amtrak engineer with 34 years of service, told the
Militant. The Canadian government had given the Montreal, Maine and
Atlantic dispensation to operate with only one crew member, cutting
costs. “If one man crew was a standard, it would be devastating to rail
safety,” Broadus said.
The benefit was marked by three deaths in rail incidents nearly two
weeks earlier. On June 27, CSX freight conductor Jake LaFave, 25, and
Steven Deal, 20, a conductor trainee, were struck and killed by an
Amtrak train while they stopped to inspect a malfunction in their
train’s wheels.
The next day, Reyhan Safoglu, 13, was killed when she was hit by a
Virginia Railway Express commuter train while walking across the Bull
Run Creek trestle in Manassas, Virginia. The tracks there run through a
populated area, near a popular swimming and fishing hole, but they
aren’t fenced off and there are no walkways. Her cousin and brother
managed to jump to safety.
— ARLENE RUBINSTEIN
Related articles:
Lac-Mégantic group calls for rail bypass, backs rail workers
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