LAC-MÉGANTIC—This is a town that has lost nearly everything, including its archival past.

They have only oral remembrance now — stories that will be told and re-told in the years to come.

History died, along with a yet unknown numbers of lives, just after midnight on July 6, 2013, the dividing hour between what came before and what lies ahead, a future that can scarcely be imagined yet. The repository of Lac-Megantic’s long-settled existence went up in a conflagration that destroyed the library and so much else of a once thriving community.

That doesn’t matter much, measured against the inconsolable despair of loved ones gone in a flash, but it too — the institutional history consigned to fire — is a shared casualty for the town’s 6,000 residents. Or something like 6,000, minus the estimated 50 victims likely to have perished when a runaway driverless freight train lurched off its tracks and slammed into the unsuspecting hamlet’s downtown core.

The grim business of recovery continued inside the perimeter of ground zero as dusk fell here Monday evening. Within 10 hours, searchers had found eight more bodies, 13 confirmed dead. But it appears increasingly doubtful that much resembling complete human remains will be retrieved from the carnage to be buried in the peaceful cemetery at the edge of town.

Amidst the charred ruins of stores and businesses, a popular bar, the annihilated library and dozens of buildings, fuel tanker-cars come to crashing rest lie on their side, their combustible contents expelled. Forensic investigators in white Hazmat suits picked methodically through the debris, searching for any human remains that might provide proof of life, proof of identification, as scavenger birds glided overhead.

There were human scavengers of misery on the ground also — not just journalists but a parade of politicians whose pity may be genuine but their timing and exploitation of horror odious. They cannot bind up anybody’s wounds, no more than an English Queen who yesterday sent sympathy and prayers.

Someone here compared inner Lac-Mégantic to Chernobyl, where a nuclear reactor disaster forced an entire populace to flee, leaving everything behind — pots still on the stove, tables set for dinner. Justin Trudeau, after his tour inside the perimeter, mentioned the half-full beer glasses on patio tables where patrons had presumably managed to run, though it’s unclear how far, if they ever made it beyond the inferno. But Chernobyl, while radioactive-poisoned for humans, was left weirdly intact structurally. This is more like Pompeii without the ashes, men and women possibly vaporized in the belly of the fire.

The recovery must come first, obviously. But the questions, blaming, finger-pointing aren’t far behind. And the ducking of responsibility has certainly already begun.

No official, whether from the Transportation Safety Board, which has carriage of the investigation, the municipality or the train’s operator — Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway — has provided a credible explanation for what happened here and why.

A freight train composed of 73 cars — excessive even for a big-time railroad like CN or CP — was clearly too much train and the rail line infrastructure possibly too antiquated to handle such a monster. It had come into a curved yard — itself a rarity these days — in Nantes, 12 kilometers away. But where are the standards that allow a train carrying flammables and chemicals to come so close to a residential community, as indeed this railroad’s line came right up into the wheelhouse of Lac-Mégantic.

Short lines make lots of money, a train expert friend tells me, doing the work of former class-one roads with class-two and -three equipment.

How could such a beast be left alone, unguarded, when its engineer clocked out for a night’s rest in a local motel? Only one engineer, not the traditional two, in this cost-cutting climate. “Tied up’’ in the train jargon, on a siding in an area of significant gradation, the downward slope that injected momentum into the runaway cars that may have been moving at heart-racing speed.

What was the cause of the “good-sized’’ blaze in a locomotive that was extinguished by a local firefighter crew before midnight, at which point they turned the train back over to on-scene functionaries of the railroad company — apparently, with its engine shut off.

The company has said the train’s brakes will not work if the train is switched off, that their engineer had left one locomotive running to ensure its air brakes worked in the event of an emergency.

There was an emergency; there were not, it appears, functioning air brakes.

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So the train, with its crude oil freight, rolled downhill on its own steam, gathering speed and momentum and lethality, until colliding with the heart of Lac-Mégantic, and erupting in blinding flame-balls on a steamy summer night.

It’s not just the scene of a tragedy. It’s the scene of a crime.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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