Exploding trains

Canadian police now believe that about 50 people were killed in Saturday’s train disaster in Quebec. So far, 20 bodies have been found after a runaway train carrying 72 tankers of oil was derailed and then exploded at Lac-Megantic.

At least 30 buildings were flattened, and about 2,000 people had to flee from their homes.  The chief executive of the train operating company says they believed the driver had failed to apply a set of hand brakes.

The operating company also suggested that firefighters bore part of the blame after they were called to put out a fire on the train late on Friday night as it was parked about 7 miles from the scene of the accident.  

One of the most disastrous train explosions of all time came on the Trans-Siberian Railway on June 4, 1989, when leaking gas from an oil pipeline ignited as two trains were passing near the town of Ufa. One train was blown into the path of the other, and over 3 miles, the landscape was turned into a wasteland, while up to 800 people died.

Cameras and meteorites

Extraordinary moving pictures of a meteorite racing across the Russian sky, shaking buildings and shattering glass, clearly demonstrate the communications revolution brought about by small portable cameras, especially mobile phones.

A decade or so ago, there would have been little chance of a camera being on hand to capture the event as it happened in a remote region nearly 1,000 miles from Moscow.  The meteorite, which burned up in the earth’s atmosphere, weighed about 10 tonnes.

More than 950 people were injured, mainly by flying glass, two of them seriously.  A much bigger heavenly body, about half the size of a football pitch, passed within 17,000 miles of earth the same day.  In astronomical terms, this qualifies as a fairly near miss.

In 1908, Russia got in the way of another asteroid or comet.  It came down in a sparsely populated region of Siberia, flattening trees over an area of 800 square miles.    And many believe that the dinosaurs were exterminated by an asteroid that hit the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico 65 million years ago.

* A cabbie writes, and recommends my book!   Thank you.   see p10  http://www.dac-callsign.com/13/Jan13/CallSignJan2013.pdf