A freight train with dozens of cars carrying flammable material derails in a quiet rural community.

Sixteen tankers jump the tracks and explode into flames.

An entire town is evacuated.

That was not Lac-Mégantic in 2013 but the town of Weyauwega, Wisc., in 1996.

The founder and chief executive officer of the Wisconsin Central railway involved in the crash was Edward Burkhardt, the same CEO who runs the Montreal Maine and Atlantic Railway at the centre of the Quebec disaster.

Burkhardt was named “Railroader of the Year” in 1999 by an industry magazine, but his cost-cutting measures over the years as he bought and sold railways and slashed staff have raised concerns from rail workers and safety experts.

The Wisconsin blaze, caused by large amounts of propane and liquefied petroleum gas in the derailed train cars, burned for two weeks and it was “sheer luck” there were no deaths or injuries, said Jim Baehnman, assistant fire chief at the time.

“We were concerned about a large explosion that would wreak havoc,” he told the Star in a phone interview.

About 3,000 people in the community were evacuated for more than three weeks, he said.

But he said the townspeople were grateful for the help and support they received from Burkhardt and his railway.

A faulty switch on the track was blamed for the derailment and the company eventually made payments to the town and some residents to settle lawsuits.

The official inquiry by the American National Transportation Safety Board found that the “Wisconsin Central management did not ensure that the two employees responsible for inspecting the track structure were properly trained.”

Just a year later, in November 1997, a handful of tanker cars carrying propane derailed in the Wisconsin town of Appleton, forcing the brief evacuation of 2,000 residents.

Burkhardt dismissed the reaction as a “tempest in a teapot.

“This was a very minor incident,” he told reporters. “There was never was any potential danger.”

But at the time the local police department said the railroad “highly minimizes what was there.”

“We’re not going to take a chance of people getting hurt of killed,” said police official Ray Reimann.

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Burkhardt sold Wisconsin Central to CN for $1.2 billion in 2001 and began accumulating other smaller rail companies around the world under his Chicago-based Rail World Inc., “specializing in privatizations and restructuring” according to its website.

When he took over the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway in 2003, he cut employee wages by 40 per cent according to a company history in the Bangor Daily News.

There were more layoffs and cuts in expenditures in 2006 and again in 2008.

The company also announced plans “to improve safety and efficiency” by cutting its locomotive crews in half, replacing two workers with a single employee.

That prompted at least one veteran engineer to quit the company in part over his fears for safety.

Jarod Briggs, who had worked on railways since 1998, told the Star he left MM&A in 2007 because he thought leaving only one engineer in charge of a train — as happened in Lac-Mégantic — was too risky.

“If you have two people watching you can catch a mistake,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Maine. “It was all about cutting, cutting, cutting. It’s just an example of putting company profits ahead of public safety.”

Briggs, who used to work on the company’s routes into Canada, said he was dismayed but not entirely surprised by the disaster in Lac Mégantic.

Statistics from the American Federal Railroad Administration show that between 2003 and 2011, Burkhardt’s MM&A company had an accident rate more than double or triple the national average for the rail industry.

In April 2011, the railway paid a $30,000 fine after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found a company repair and maintenance shop, left unattended, leaked oil into the Piscataquis River in Maine five years earlier.