LAC-MÉGANTIC, QUE.—After a long lull at the site of a massive train explosion here, officials announced a horrific rise in the death toll, saying they have found eight additional bodies in the space of less than 10 hours of searching.

The grisly discoveries bring the number of people killed in the Saturday morning accident and series of explosions that occurred in its wake to 13. That number is only expected to rise in the coming hours and the coming days as police bumped up the number of people who are unaccounted for to 50.

“We’ve all seen the pictures . . . For me, the most compelling image that I saw when I visited was not the devastation, which is obviously tremendously overwhelming,” said Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, who toured the site Monday afternoon. “It’s a small patio bar about halfway down the street on a stretch that was untouched but obviously nearby. The bottles of beer are still standing. The glasses are half full. Everything was just left on the table as people fled for their lives.”

He added: “For me, that image is like something out of Pompeii, in Italy, where a moment of complete disaster struck this beautiful city.”

The stunning reality of what has occurred in this town of 6,000 is starting to sink in. While municipal officials are preparing plans to move displaced residents back to sectors located behind a vast security cordon as early as Tuesday, boil-water advisories remained in place for those downstream along the Chaudière River. Contamination is being discovered in lakes and in the town’s sewer system that has still been unexpectedly bursting into flames at times.

Around Lac Mégantic, public officials are growing noticeably edgier, frantic TV crews are arriving from around the world and the politicians who come to pay their respects and show their support leave with their sun-bronzed faces suddenly ashen.

But those whose duties include making sense of the tragedy are shifting into a higher gear. The provincial coroner’s office, which will bear the brunt of the efforts over the coming days and weeks, have called in specialists to help them identify the human remains using tooth and bone fragments. Families of the suspected victims have been explicitly asked on live television to report to the local high school with toothbrushes, combs, razors, hats or anything else that might bear DNA fragments of those who disappeared at one o’clock Saturday morning.

“We expect to find victims in all sorts of conditions, whether it be bodies, body parts or bone fragments. We knew that everything would be possible,” said Genevieve Guilbault, a spokesperson with the Quebec coroner’s office. “So the idea is to have a multitude of experts available in order to respond when we see what type of material we find.”

When the wall of fire emerged from the runaway train that went off the tracks right at Lac Mégantic’s main strip, whole families were sleeping. Young women were tending bar and serving celebratory drinks with close friends and loved ones. Others were entertaining those revellers with song.

Now search teams are combing through what police have labelled a crime scene.

Early Monday morning search crews were still confined to a small portion of the razed area because it was still deemed too dangerous — the risk of more explosions, of fires reigniting, of building carcasses falling down. But by day’s end, police Sgt. Benoit Richard said, “We can go practically anywhere now.”

The work is now shared among 13 forensic police investigators who are collecting evidence of wrongdoing, officials with the Transportation Safety Board who are trying to figure out what, or who, caused the carnage, and the fire crews still on hand to assure the safety of the remaining structures.

But while those conducting the investigation can move freely about the disaster site, no details are being provided about the specific locations or conditions in which the bodies have been found. Of the 13 now dead, none has been positively identified. With dozens of anxious families hanging on every official update for news, police are taking pains to provide neither false hope nor give grim indicators that turn out to be false.

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The five bodies were found in the first 24 hours have been sent to a coroner’s laboratory in Montreal for the kind of advanced testing that will hopefully give the dead an identity and families some closure.

They are families like Raymond Lafontaine, a prominent Lac-Mégantic businessman who fears he has lost a son and two daughters-in-law in the blast. Trudeau met with Lafontaine Monday afternoon.

“He asked me to make him a promise that I would never forget what I saw here and what he has gone through, and that in the weeks to come and the years to come, we would act,” said Trudeau, who declined to assign any blame to the rail company that owns the train, Montreal, Maine & Atlantic.

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