Fires were still burning more than 24 hours after a driverless train carrying petroleum products derailed and exploded in a Quebec town, setting off a massive fire that killed at least one person, reports NBC News.
Authorities warned that the death toll was likely to rise.
Quebec provincial police Lt. Michel Brunet refused to say how high the death toll could eventually go, but said authorities have been told “many” people have been reported missing.
Lt. Guy Lapointe, a spokesman with Quebec provincial police, said: “I don’t want to get into numbers, what I will say is we do expect we’ll have other people who will be found deceased unfortunately.”
Lapointe would not give an estimate of those who were unaccounted for because police were having difficulty fixing a number.
“People are calling in reported loved ones missing, some people are reported two, three times missing by different members of the family,” he said.
Railroad officials said a crew parked the train outside of Lac-Megantic and wasn’t aboard when several hours later it somehow began rolling down the tracks and derailed around 1 a.m. local time Saturday.
Four tanker cars exploded in a blast that set ablaze multiple buildings in the center of the lakeside town of 6,000 people close to the U.S. border. Up to 2,000 people were forced from their homes in the lakeside town, which is about 155 miles east of Montreal and about 10 miles west of Maine.
Read more of the story herehttp://nbcnews.to/12k2R4o
