She said the town of 6,000 people still has a team of psychologists working to help residents who were traumatized by the disaster.

The footage came from a stock agency called Pond5, which has a library of over 14 million video clips including from military conflicts, natural disasters and fictional scenes. Jason Teichman, the agency’s chief executive, said the company also provided Lac-Mégantic footage to the Netflix series “Travelers.” Peacock Alley Entertainment, which produced the show, said in a statement that it did not know what the footage depicted when they bought it, and that they would replace it. But Netflix declined to explain why the footage would not be edited out of “Bird Box.”

When Pond5 obtains images or video, it verifies the origins and then provides guidance to their customers as to how to use it appropriately, Mr. Teichman said in an interview. The clip from Lac-Mégantic was tagged as footage of a newsworthy historical event, he said. Mr. Teichman apologized for how the footage was used and said the company would review its practices.

“All of us here feel awful that we didn’t do as much as we possibly could to make sure it was used appropriately,” he said.

The mayor said that town leaders learned from news outlets that the footage was in “Travelers” and subsequently a resident notified officials that it also was in “Bird Box,” an apocalyptic sci-fi thriller starring Sandra Bullock in which people mysteriously start committing suicide.