On This Day in History: November 10

The Mississauga Miracle

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The train derailing wasn’t the miracle, what happened afterward was. They called it the Mississauga Miracle because when train cars carrying toxic chemicals derailed and exploded, causing a massive poisonous fireball, over 200,000 people in the nearby Ontario city were quickly evacuated in the night, and not a single person died.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: November 10, 1979--

Much like Ben Shapiro’s wife, the bearing on one of the wheels on the 33rd train car was not properly lubricated. Late in the evening of November 10, 1979, friction burned through the axle and a fucktacular chain of derailment followed, with 24 cars leaving the tracks. The cars contained very not harmless substances such as chlorine, styrene, propane, and caustic soda. Those cars split open and a chemical shit-mix-nado went kerblooie, launching a fireball an entire fucking mile into the sky that could be seen over 60 miles away.

Amidst the chaos, there was a tanker filled with 90 tonnes of liquid chlorine. If it blew, it would be like a World War I gas attack, except probably worse. Fortunately, Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion said hey, this is bad. We need to get people the fuck out. Continues below …

If your life is a train wreck, it’s okay if you don’t give me money. Otherwise, click the green button.

As firefighters fought to contain the flames, the evacuation of almost a quarter million people commenced throughout the night, with police and ambulances going house to house and blasting on speakers to wake the fuck up and move the fuck out or you’re gonna die. Nursing homes and hospitals were evacuated. Women in labor were told to stop pushing and clench. People who were not in the evacuation zone welcomed the refugees into their homes. Then some of those who took people in were told hey actually, this is even worse than we thought y’all need to get the fuck out too.

For most of a week Mississauga was a ghost town, representing the largest peacetime evacuation in North American history until Hurricane Katrina. There were many heroes that day, but 27-year-old train brakeman Larry Krupa stands out. He risked his life to uncouple the rest of the train, which also was carrying a shit-ton of nasty chemicals, so it could pull away from the catastrophe.

The Mississauga Miracle became a model for how to handle a crisis with speed and efficiency. Hazel McCallion, who was in her first term as mayor and kept getting re-elected over and over until her retirement at the age of 93 in 2014, spoke of how fortunate the city was the derailment happened where it did. “A half-mile farther down the track,” she said, “we would have seen thousands of people wiped out.”

Thanks, Chris, for the suggestion of today’s topic.

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