When I realized I was vacationing less than an hour from Lac-Mégantic last week, I grabbed my passport and went.
I somehow needed to see for myself what happened there.
Lac-Mégantic is a small tourist town on Lac-Mégantic in Quebec. On July 6, 2013, at about one in the morning, a runaway train carrying crude oil barreled into the town. It derailed, burst into flames, sent fireballs into the air and killed more than 42 people. It killed people asleep in their homes, people having a night out at the Musi-Cafe, and it destroyed half of the historic business district including the library. Burning crude oil spilled onto the ground, into sewers, and even into basements.
The Toronto Star published this interactive graphic that shows what was destroyed and tells the story of the people who died.
Today there are still barricades on the main road into what was the downtown. It is a three kilometer detour to drive around to get to the remaining part. Checkpoints keep traffic and visitors out of what was once the southern half of the main part of town.
Dirt is mounded as workers clean up piles and piles of contaminated soil along the train track where homes and businesses once stood. The ones that weren’t fully destroyed have boarded up windows. This clean up is expected to take years. In the meantime, Lac-Mégantic has controversial plans for a new business district in another location.
Ashes to hope
Somehow the whole scene looked a bit too familiar - like blocks of Detroit had been plopped down in the middle of a lakeside resort town in Canada.
Detroit wasn’t hit by a train and nothing happened overnight in Detroit. Maybe in some stretch of a metaphorical sense you could think of the forces of globalism, neglect, and societal change that starved Detroit as a slow moving freight train.
But both Detroit and Lac-Mégantic are now left to figure out how to move forward with a shattered economic base and communities physically and emotionally torn apart. Detroit, like Lac-Mégantic, has plans for the future that may or may not come to pass.
And both places have a long road ahead.
A conversation in Lac-Mégantic
I sat down at Passion Chocolate -a small cafe at the edge of the ruined part of town. A man approached my table and addressed me in English. He had seen my Michigan license plate. He told me he’s from Windsor right across the river from Detroit and that he has family in Michigan.
He then asked if I know what happened in Lac-Mégantic? I nodded yes. And then he apologized for the state of the town.
“It is usually a beautiful place”, he said. To which I could only manage to mutter, “I’m sorry for what happened here.”
“Me too,” he said and then he encouraged me to come back again when things are better.
I’ve been thinking about that exchange for days and wondering if anyone in Michigan would say something similar about Detroit? Would we ever tell a visitor to come back when our largest city is once again beautiful?
Do we even truly believe that day will come?
