Field and Revelstoke - Canada's Transportation Safety Board (TSB) said Saturday it's looking into
two unrelated railway derailments in B.C.'s mountains, deploying investigators to one near Field, and gathering
information on another near Revelstoke that sent two people to hospital.
One of CPKC's trains derailed near Field, a small community near the Alberta border, the TSB said, adding it had sent a
"team of investigators" to the site, known as Ottertail station (Ottertail milpost 8.2 Mountain
Sub).
In a statement Sunday morning, the TSB said the derailment happened on Saturday, but did not provide an exact
time.
Meanwhile, another derailment nearly 13 kilometres east of Revelstoke (between Twin Butte and Greely about milepost
117.0) happened after 22:00, Friday, after two trains collided east of the southern interior city, sparking a fire,
officials confirmed.
In the Revelstoke incident, CPKC says one of its trains hit another one, which was stopped nearly 13 kilometres east
of Revelstoke, roughly 150 kilometres northeast of Kelowna.
"The TSB is currently gathering information and monitoring the situation," TSB spokesperson Liam MacDonald
told CBC News in an email Saturday.
It did not deploy investigators to the site of the Revelstoke incident, where CPKC said four of its train cars carrying
grain on the parked train derailed.
Derailment Near Revelstoke Sends 2 to Hospital
The railway says there was also a fire on one of the trains that has since been extinguished, and their crews remained
on the site Saturday to investigate the cause of the crash and clean up the damage.
"Two crew members on the moving train were taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening
injuries.
One has been released," they said in a statement.
"There were no other injuries."
Revelstoke's fire chief said they responded to reports of a train crash and someone being trapped inside the train just
after 22:30, Friday.
"I had a conversation with the CPKC representative who told me there was, in fact, a fuel fire caused by the
locomotive that was off the tracks," Steven DeRousie, head of Revelstoke Fire Rescue Services, told CBC News in a
phone interview.
"As far as I understand, the fire is now out."
DeRousie said that, while fire crews initially responded to the reports of someone being trapped on board the train,
they were then told by ambulance crews that the person was out of the train and crews returned to the fire
station.
The fire chief said they could not respond to the fire itself as the derailment happened outside city
boundaries.
He added that an "acrid smell" hung over the town of around 7,500 people after the fire on the train, but
there were no immediate concerns for the city's water supply.
"It smelled somewhat like maybe burning garbage, that plastic-y odour," he said Saturday
afternoon.
"It was an unpleasant odour. It seems to have dissipated now with the the fire being put out."
CBC News has asked the operator if there was any damage to the surrounding environment, including nearby
streams.
(The railway parallels the Illecillewaet River at that point.)
CPKC responded with a short statement, reading that their environmental teams "are on site to access, contain, and
recover any spilled fuel from the locomotives."
The statement did not clarify if any particular streams were affected.
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